Making Sense - Sam Harris - #408 — Finding Equanimity in Chaos

00:00:00.000 sam harris welcome back to the show yeah thank you you've had a you've had a year so far this

00:00:25.540 month it's been a year yeah yeah well let's start there's been a lot of shit that's happened with

00:00:30.400 you this year let's just start with the fires can you just tell the basic story of what happened

00:00:35.560 in your neighborhood yeah well we just were you know we were part of the palisades fire not the

00:00:41.140 the real epicenter of it where you know people have seen photos of just like nagasaki level

00:00:46.140 destruction but on the periphery but four houses burned very close to our house so we're we're in

00:00:52.600 a neighborhood that is remarkably untouched and life will be uh in fact it has returned to normal

00:00:58.880 there for most people but we're close enough to burned homes that we decided you know we're not

00:01:05.220 we can't come back to our home yet and who knows when i mean it might be a year i mean we're just

00:01:10.040 waiting for the cleanup so we've you know we've been dislocated by that whole process and our and you

00:01:16.000 know we are much of our lives were in the palisades our you know our daughter's school burned down i mean

00:01:21.680 lots of things changed about daily life as well and obviously we know scores of people at this

00:01:28.420 point who who lost their homes right maybe you you have a million questions about this but just

00:01:33.980 remembering the night that this happened i checked in with you on text and then you later wrote about

00:01:38.480 this on substack on your substack that you left with a wife two daughters two cats of jar of mdma and a

00:01:47.080 gun yeah yeah i'm not sure it was in that order but yeah yeah yeah this is you know we're we're we're

00:01:54.660 a couple weeks away from it as we're recording it and we're talking about it in a reasonably light

00:01:59.080 way but i have to imagine it was really hard on you on annika your wife and on the girls to what extent

00:02:06.660 did meditation help oh a lot yeah i mean that's uh you know i can't say it helped the girls that much

00:02:13.800 but i mean it helped us with the girls i mean we you know i think i should acknowledge you know by

00:02:19.340 comparison with many other situations we were in a very fortunate situation although for about um

00:02:25.360 12 hours i was actually sure we had lost our home like i got some false information online

00:02:31.800 that convinced me at about you know midnight the night of the fire that our our home was burning at

00:02:37.500 that moment and that was a really a kind of an amazing experience just to kind of let go of all that

00:02:42.580 in real time because when i left the house you know we left we left pretty early and i felt like

00:02:48.460 we're being very conservative to leave and then when annika picked our daughter up at school it was quite

00:02:52.920 clear that the extent of the emergency but when i was leaving the house i took basic you know virtually

00:02:59.040 nothing and i mean i didn't really think it was within the realm of i guess i knew it was in the realm

00:03:06.520 of possibility but it did not seem likely that the fire was going to reach our house or where we you

00:03:12.740 know our neighborhood and i mean much less burned down seemed to burn down half the city i mean it

00:03:18.740 was just at a certain point the fire was such that like why doesn't the entire city burn down like

00:03:24.020 clearly we can't stop this you know and and this is now in the flats of los angeles and in multiple

00:03:29.180 places and it was as people know there was there were many cases of arson and it was just it was a

00:03:34.120 it was armageddon of some sort in los angeles but after 12 hours i realized our house hadn't burned

00:03:41.160 down and then you know then i recognized we were in a very lucky situation compared to many many people

00:03:46.580 you know thousands of people yeah it's a lucky situation but it's incredibly stressful and it really

00:03:51.100 is a collision with the notion of impermanence yeah the buddhists win in in situations like this you

00:03:57.300 realize that the impermanence reigns and you know there's no it's all rented and it's all subject to

00:04:04.660 entropy you know there's just no there's nothing stable you know your body isn't stable your health

00:04:10.980 isn't stable your relationships aren't stable your career isn't stable your house isn't i mean it's just

00:04:15.480 it's constantly being shored up by effort to maintain it and improve it and diminish the chaos but

00:04:23.600 in a situation like this you realize you just can't take anything for granted really i mean what you

00:04:28.700 can take for granted is it's all unstable and it can change at any moment by what mechanism can one

00:04:36.020 achieve some equanimity in the face of ceaseless change and entropy well recognizing what you actually

00:04:44.020 have in each moment which is this moment of conscious experience and your ability to locate

00:04:50.220 a feeling of well-being in the midst of that or your failure to do that right so you what you're

00:04:56.540 constantly experiencing whether you think of it in these terms or not is this alternation between

00:05:01.780 some state of contraction where you're unhappy you know grossly or subtly and you're responding

00:05:09.620 to the world as though you have a problem that you must solve and sometimes you do have a problem you

00:05:14.940 must solve i mean in this case we had the problem of you know having to evacuate and having to find

00:05:18.880 another place to stay and et cetera et cetera so it's not i'm not saying that you can just meditate

00:05:23.900 your way you know blissfully out of a situation without having to solve problems but the question

00:05:28.920 is always how unhappy do you have to be to respond to this challenge in the world and most of us most of

00:05:36.940 the time even after we learn to meditate are by default far more contracted and unhappy and you know

00:05:44.660 perseverative and and ruminating self-lacerating etc etc than we need to be i mean and there are ways

00:05:52.340 to have this epiphany and provoke this epiphany every time you lose it uh one is meditation but

00:05:58.020 one is just a kind of reframing that many people are familiar with now based on the the growing

00:06:03.320 popularity of stoicism you can just recognize just how much worse things can be you know or could have

00:06:09.140 been in this moment right and and you can easily imagine a situation where if you were in that

00:06:14.100 situation you would consider your prayers answered if you could only be restored to the problem you are

00:06:20.200 confronting right now right like you know you know you don't have the cancer diagnosis or the you know

00:06:26.020 the amputated limb or you know everything you you know to come back to the fire every you didn't lose

00:06:30.860 everything you you own right you just now have a a different problem to solve and if you had been in one of

00:06:36.580 those buckets you'd be desperate to get out of it and into the one you're in now right so you can

00:06:42.360 there's a way to actually just kind of reset and feel this is so much better than an adjacently

00:06:49.080 possible alternative and in this case with the fire it's so much better than what i thought i had

00:06:53.780 you know the night of the fire which was you know i was meditating on the evaporation of everything

00:06:59.480 we had built but i was honestly i was surprisingly perhaps not surprisingly but i was quite equanimous

00:07:07.340 in the midst of that experience thinking you know at that moment you know lying in bed i hadn't yet

00:07:12.520 told the girls or annika but i had looked at my phone and i got you know information that convinced me

00:07:18.140 again around it was around midnight or one in the morning that okay our house is burning right now

00:07:23.800 right and then i would just meditate it on that fact it was just like a you know kind of one of

00:07:29.420 those buddhist graveyard meditations where you're just kind of meditating on the decay of the body or

00:07:33.840 you know you're just a meditation on impermanence and it was there's something quite beautiful about

00:07:38.760 it to just to recognize that it would it would only be attachment to the idea of those things that

00:07:43.960 would allow me to suffer in this moment but non-attachment it makes sense absolutely makes sense

00:07:50.820 you know when you hear sam harris or joseph goldstein holding forth on it and when your house is

00:07:58.520 burning yeah with no one you love in it i mean that's an important consideration fair enough but

00:08:05.480 you know i think we feel some legitimate attachment to our possessions uh hopefully not too much but

00:08:12.680 you know i can make some defense of uh you know caring about the state of your home and

00:08:18.380 and also also it's not just for just to give some more color to that in this case when i was thinking

00:08:24.780 about it it wasn't so much the possessions but it was also just the amount of sunk cost with respect

00:08:30.940 to time and attention that they represent it's like you know we had designed the house we had built the

00:08:36.100 house with like that was a whole process you know and when you think about just you know the thousands

00:08:42.080 of books you've collected and i mean like all the choices that created that you know material

00:08:50.600 circumstance is there so much time in in retrospect when you imagine it all evaporating you just think

00:08:56.420 wow that that was you know i spent a lot of time gathering all that stuff and we're all going to

00:09:03.580 have obviously at the end of our lives we're all going to have that analogous reflection you know we

00:09:07.980 don't need a fire for that the fire is burning in our bodies at this very moment but yeah it's

00:09:14.180 just you when you think about it's kind of a reset it forces a reset of your priorities i mean what

00:09:19.020 you have is your time and attention yeah so just drilling into that moment you're lying in bed you've

00:09:24.640 gotten this information which thankfully turns out later to be wrong i can hear two things thus far

00:09:31.200 in this conversation and i can imagine a third that would at least a third that would help you manage

00:09:36.900 it after you know 40 years of contemplative practice in your own life i might be wrong about

00:09:41.940 math on this but that's exactly exact math yeah one is the stoic cognitive reframe of yeah from a

00:09:49.400 certain perspective if i was if this bed was in a hospital and i had an iv drip of chemo i would much

00:09:56.380 rather be in the bed i'm actually in contemplating the the destruction of my home the second is reverting

00:10:04.220 back to your buddhist training of yeah well this is just a reminder of what is non-negotiably true

00:10:09.800 everything is impermanent and just touching in on that truth of the universe can turn down the volume

00:10:18.120 on hysteria and then the third and i can imagine there's possibly at least one more would be

00:10:25.720 mindfulness of your emotions so you can allow the fear the anger the frustration to come

00:10:31.860 but if you're not re-upping it compulsively it does pass and you're able to make better decisions on the

00:10:38.500 other side of that so my is that third hypothesis correct about what was happening in your mind in

00:10:44.420 that moment yeah well actually in that moment i was i didn't have much fear or anger or anything to

00:10:52.040 meditate on i mean it was it was there was much more equanimity than um i mean honestly i was i was

00:10:58.400 surprised at just how easy it was to let go of all our material possessions you know again i'm an

00:11:05.980 incredibly fortunate circumstance so like i you know unlike many people i we had fire insurance right

00:11:10.880 so like i knew this isn't like you know you're losing all of your actual wealth because you know

00:11:16.360 the fire is burning everything you own and nothing's insured and there there are people in that situation

00:11:21.960 too but there there's something again it's it's once you have this module installed in your brain

00:11:29.560 once you've thought about impermanence as much as we have and and use that thought to motivate a

00:11:36.780 practice which allows you to to let go of thoughts of past and future moment by moment i mean you know

00:11:41.780 mindfulness by another name there's something um you know almost perversely satisfying about having to

00:11:49.980 to deal with a moment like that right you know and i honestly i expect the same experience when you

00:11:56.640 know i get some terrible health diagnosis i mean i mean this is the on some level we're training for

00:12:02.940 those moments where i more reliably fail you know and this is actually on some level much more

00:12:10.340 consequential because it's much more frequent i fail in all the little moments in life where it's just

00:12:16.480 a completely petty thing to which you should be psychologically impervious but it is just annoying

00:12:23.060 to have this thing happen right whatever it is you know the i mean honestly for me it's something like

00:12:28.760 i'm out in the world and i spill you know food on a shirt and i now have to spend like four hours

00:12:35.260 out in the world with like tomato sauce on my shirt that's the kind of thing that just you know just

00:12:40.260 jams a stick into every gear in my in my emotional brain that's worse than having than believing that

00:12:47.460 everything in my house everything i own is burning up at that moment i'm then i'm gonna have to tell

00:12:52.260 the girls the next morning that that happened right like honestly in terms of my departure from

00:12:58.440 what i consider a norm a normative state of you know well-being any kind of recognition of

00:13:03.060 you know psychological freedom the tomato sauce on the shirt is worse for me you know i relate to that

00:13:09.720 and i i'll i'll hazard a a theory about why that is just um for myself it's the volume of the

00:13:17.620 mindfulness bell yeah so when something huge is happening the mindfulness bell is a gong it gets

00:13:23.920 rung you wake this is it yeah but this is the dance exactly the tomato sauce it's for at least for me it

00:13:31.420 just doesn't it's not a wake-up moment right yeah you stay in the dream of your kind of dualistic

00:13:39.540 reactivity to whatever's happening so for me i think practice is much you know the the leading

00:13:46.440 edge of practice is not so much the big moments it's the little moments it's like making the ordinary

00:13:53.720 glitches in life more and more salient as mindfulness bells more more just that they goad you to pay

00:14:02.080 attention more reliably because i know the big moments are i mean obviously the big moments are

00:14:08.280 more consequential in in many ways but there's so many more of the other i mean that really is the

00:14:13.660 tissue of our lives and yeah so i'm constantly impressed by how much of the day i can spend

00:14:22.500 in this kind of mediocre orbit of just reacting to little things and being just just a complaining

00:14:32.540 jerk you know and you know if in and and you know sometimes in the privacy in my mind and rather

00:14:38.520 often you know it you know to my wife and anyone else who will listen or not listen as the case may

00:14:43.820 be but uh yeah and that's obviously that's such a that's the missed opportunity right i mean because

00:14:50.120 then you spent half your day that way i'm with you brother yeah um just to say our wives are on the

00:14:56.660 other side of this wall affirmatively having chosen not to listen to this conversation so that they can

00:15:02.240 kivitz yeah so we have many similarities in our domestic situations um so i just want to go back

00:15:09.300 to the gun in the moment of choosing i should say the other thing you chose as you were fleeing the house

00:15:15.580 was a mala from your days in india and nepal and then you write on substack this moment of triage

00:15:22.880 produced a brief reflection on the many years i'd spent traveling along seemingly incongruent paths

00:15:29.000 how many people understand the value of both a mala which is a uh so i have a bracelet with beads on it

00:15:35.520 and a gun and can carry each without feeling like a fraud so i i suspect when i mentioned the word gun

00:15:42.140 early on in this conversation some people in my audience were like what yeah he's got a gun so like

00:15:46.980 how how can you yeah what is what is your attitude about having a gun yeah was it this i guess

00:15:52.860 a larger ethical consideration so i mean actually not that many steps so so for anyone who's

00:15:58.540 interested i wrote at least a decade ago i wrote an article which blind certainly blindsided most of

00:16:03.380 my audience titled uh the riddle of the gun wherein i kind of talk about what i can say i mean the kind

00:16:10.080 of the ethics of violence more and and self-defense more broadly i wrote a couple of articles i think i

00:16:16.040 wrote an article the logic of violence too but kind of in quick succession i like part of my midlife

00:16:20.920 crisis took the form of me getting back into martial arts and training with firearms and doing

00:16:26.180 those sorts of things and um but i had always had kind of had that gear i mean from being a teenager

00:16:32.360 on unless you're a pacifist and i and i have an argument as to why one would not want to be a

00:16:38.720 pacifist i you know i think as as though gandhi and style pacifism seems to occupy something like a

00:16:45.700 moral high ground in people's thinking about violence and and how one can be ethical in the

00:16:51.040 world especially once one starts taking on you know overtly spiritual meditative contemplative

00:16:56.080 concerns it's actually not a high point on the moral landscape i would argue i mean i think being

00:17:02.480 a pacifist is really just a way of outsourcing a real ethical consideration of violence to other

00:17:10.180 people who are not pacifists you know you're relying on the police you're relying on people

00:17:15.000 who are going to shoulder the burden of protecting the people you love when things fail otherwise it's

00:17:19.900 just in my view it's a starkly unethical position and you know i have some argument about you know why

00:17:25.280 that's the case which we could get into but um so once you decide you're not a pacifist then we're

00:17:31.720 just talking about in what situations is the use of force necessary and and ethical and and then what is

00:17:39.160 your relationship to that and can you outsource everything or or not and i've just been around

00:17:45.040 long enough and read enough books and seen and news stories to know that there are many situations in

00:17:51.460 fact even most in which you could find yourself threatened by violence where you can't really

00:17:57.720 effectively outsource your self-defense to the police you know which is to say that in most american

00:18:04.900 cities dialing 911 is not a self-defense strategy right it's a you know we're happy to have the

00:18:11.700 police and and we're happy to have them respond to crime and we want them to solve crime but in almost

00:18:16.540 every case they're responding to the aftermath of whatever situation you were in that you managed

00:18:22.520 to solve or not you know before they got there so once you understand that then the question is

00:18:28.680 even if you think it's a very low probability event and and it's you know depending on where you live

00:18:33.940 it it can be a higher probability than than you think what preparation do you want to have made

00:18:40.400 to face a situation where you know someone comes into your home for the the purpose of killing you

00:18:46.140 and your family right which is you know i'm not worried about people stealing televisions i'm worried

00:18:50.380 about actual violence right people who you know come in for the purpose of harming you and and just to

00:18:55.600 say sorry to interrupt you you've had more than your fair share of death threats i mean yeah yeah so i'm

00:19:00.100 not talking to a regular joe in this right right i mean i have the same view of the situation not

00:19:07.380 being a public person but yeah you when you add that component to it it's not irrational for me to

00:19:13.360 think about security and self-defense and that's just you know that's been true for 20 years at least

00:19:19.580 so but this was a situation where i was anticipating however dimly i mean again when i left the house it was

00:19:26.980 not obvious that this thing was going to get totally out of control but once it was obvious

00:19:30.820 that it was going to get totally out of control and a few hours later i was hearing reports of

00:19:35.420 people looting homes you know a few blocks from where we're sitting right and you know the cops

00:19:41.060 just not responding like there's just no the city's on fire right and people are are looting

00:19:45.640 neighborhoods that are being evacuated or soon to be will soon be evacuated there are even reports

00:19:50.940 whether spurious or not i never actually never got to the bottom of them but there were reports on

00:19:56.080 social media that people were lighting fires so as to provoke an evacuation order so that they could

00:20:01.100 loot the homes right there were definitely cases of arson so once you're in that situation then you

00:20:06.240 realize okay you really can't rely on cops to necessarily protect you and so yeah so and the

00:20:13.540 justification for a gun is i mean i could have you know provided you're trained to use it and you're

00:20:18.660 you know you're a responsible gun owner which is to say you know how to store a gun safely and

00:20:23.140 i mean there's just there's no excuse for kids picking up guns and killing themselves or killing

00:20:28.140 you know other people by accident because you can store a gun safely and have quick access to it

00:20:33.500 but the justification for a gun is very much as the the odious organization the nra would allege it is the

00:20:41.880 only thing that really equalizes your capacity to use force against somebody else you know in the

00:20:50.080 absence of a gun even if you even in the presence of other weapons right even you know even everything

00:20:56.440 else becomes an athletic event right like you are you are wise to expect that the younger more

00:21:02.340 aggressive larger person is going to win certainly the better trained person you stack all of those

00:21:09.200 advantages then there's there's nothing that the little old lady can do to defend herself right you

00:21:14.740 know there's nothing that the even well-trained very fit uh young man can do to defend himself

00:21:22.460 against multiple attackers the stuff you've seen you know i mean they're yes they're kind of one in a

00:21:27.980 thousand results you know there and there are a few associated youtube videos where you see one guy

00:21:33.460 defeat you know four attackers because he's he's a boxer and he just he's being attacked by bozos and

00:21:40.000 you know he manages to defend himself but normally speaking you know it doesn't matter if you're a

00:21:46.460 navy seal you can't defend yourself against multiple young guys who are not bozos except if

00:21:53.620 you have a gun right so a gun is an equalizer and more importantly it's one of the only weapons and the

00:22:00.220 only you know really reliable weapon that gives you range from the problem right like it's the only

00:22:05.460 thing that someone kicks down the door of your house and you're in the living room 20 feet away

00:22:10.160 from this person you can defend yourself right you get you can negotiate you can tell them to leave

00:22:15.620 and if they don't leave you can defend yourself you know once you're you know grabbing uh you know

00:22:21.880 pots and pans or kitchen knives right like this is now you're you're very much closer to the state

00:22:28.240 of nature and i and in a contest with a with a grizzly bear and you know many people don't want to

00:22:34.260 think about these things certainly most meditators i think when we're talking about the kinds of

00:22:38.220 people who want to hear us talk about mindfulness these are probably not the kinds of people who are

00:22:42.420 also obsessing on the details of criminal violence but you know i have gone deeply down the rabbit hole

00:22:49.780 of both and yeah i mean it's just simply a fact that when someone you know in the rare case of you

00:22:56.660 know like a home invasion by you know some sociopath who wants to actually who's decided that night

00:23:01.820 that he wants to kill someone or rape and kill someone or you know whatever it is you have many

00:23:07.260 disadvantages stacked against you right like this person has done this sort of thing before in many

00:23:12.700 cases many times before this person probably spent years in prison right and was released right he went

00:23:17.920 to graduate school for criminal violence and there are people like that in the world and again it's it

00:23:23.760 depending on where you live it could be a very low probability consideration such that it could seem

00:23:29.780 completely paranoid to ever worry about it but it's also paranoid to worry about plane crashes

00:23:35.720 certainly you know and people worry about that and we want to design our planes and our system so as

00:23:41.440 to really minimize that you know the threat of that kind of destruction and yeah it's just not it's not

00:23:48.680 a one in a million chance that if you live in a big city you might be the target of violent crime it's

00:23:53.120 more like a one in 500 chance depending where you live so on the subject of violence there was a

00:24:00.080 again i i was following your writings i always follow your writings closely but i was following

00:24:05.460 them especially closely in the wake of what happened uh here in la with the fires and there was a phrase

00:24:12.560 in something you wrote that just kind of stuck out to me and i'd be curious to hear what what your

00:24:16.920 intention was this is where you're referencing the fact that you that people are breaking into homes and

00:24:21.920 looting and you say when i later heard that some of these looters may also be arsonists setting fire

00:24:27.600 throughout the city so that they can plunder the lives of everyone forced to evacuate i noticed that

00:24:32.140 the phrase police death squads had a nice ring to it right right yeah yeah i mean that's a little

00:24:38.440 tongue-in-cheek but it definitely captures an emotion that i was feeling which is just like the absolute

00:24:46.580 limit of moral outrage i mean just the idea that someone would do that right you know you you have

00:24:53.760 this catastrophic fire that is driving people from their homes the idea that you're going to have

00:24:59.460 people who are setting more fires so as to drive more people so they could prey on the people who are

00:25:05.200 fleeing their homes yeah it's just i mean that's the complete collapse of civilization right and the idea

00:25:10.460 that we're living in a i mean there were so many things that i was was noticing i think i wrote about in

00:25:15.240 that piece that was um yeah kindling a very worried and very kind of cynical view of human nature i mean

00:25:22.820 they're like i i think the one that got to me and it seems somehow i don't know if this resonated with

00:25:28.260 with most people i mean i think i wrote about it in that piece but for some reason this got to me

00:25:32.620 i saw when it was reported that steven spielberg's house was saved and i saw people online just

00:25:40.040 trashing him like clearly they would have been happier to hear that his house had burned

00:25:44.240 and they thought it was somehow sinister that his had been saved that you know like that he you know

00:25:49.800 he leveraged his wealth or there's there was some jewish you know conspiracy theory that explained

00:25:55.160 whatever whatever it was i mean there's some nexus of awfulness that explained that response but

00:25:59.600 the thing that got me was that i know that many of these people if not all of these people have

00:26:06.060 over decades happily watched his films right like these are these are the people who buy tickets to

00:26:11.620 spielberg's films and yet they were not even covertly overtly poised to celebrate kind of the

00:26:19.280 ruination of everything he you know he had accumulated in life there's just something so

00:26:23.960 i guess this goes in this larger bin of just what the internet is doing to us right it's like there's

00:26:29.540 it's selecting for the worst aspects of human psychology you know it's like false outrage and schadenfreude

00:26:36.520 and you know a complete obsession with fame but like this subterranean hatred of the people you're

00:26:42.340 obsessed with like you're like you you know you you build these people up only to gleefully watch

00:26:47.000 them come undone you know it's just it's there's something just ghastly about this funhouse mirror

00:26:52.420 that we're spending so much time in front of which is in large measure why i you know as you know we've

00:26:57.900 talked about before i deleted my twitter account years ago and i mean that was i'm still embarrassed

00:27:03.520 to say it i mean that was like the biggest life hack i've managed to find in more than a decade of

00:27:09.380 you know looking at life hacks and i mean it was just it was the highest leverage move psychologically

00:27:14.940 that i found in in many many years it's just a fantastic change to my life because of how toxic

00:27:22.320 i was finding it to be to just see just to witness who people were on social media you know and and and

00:27:31.120 i mean i certainly wasn't my best self on social media i i don't think i participated in kind of

00:27:37.060 pylons or internecine squabbles that embarrassed me in retrospect i mean i definitely contaminated my

00:27:43.840 life with with more controversy than it needed but it's not that i ever really behaved badly online at

00:27:52.160 least i'm not remembering anything that i regret but it was just toxic to see what everyone else was

00:27:59.060 doing and to know that i was i i knew it was a if not an not an entirely false perception of them but

00:28:06.560 it was certainly a partial view of these people and yet it was turning me into a kind of misanthrope

00:28:13.200 i mean i was just i was kidding it was my view of humanity was getting darker and darker and darker

00:28:17.260 and you know once i stepped away from it i realized okay life is it's rather often very good and the

00:28:24.100 people you meet you know even you know strangers out in the world are mostly very very nice people

00:28:28.380 and and people and not everyone is a psychopath you know even though they can appear to be psychopaths

00:28:33.780 on twitter well and the algorithms amplify the psychopaths oh yeah so twitter your your invoking

00:28:41.140 of twitter kind of brings me to the the next thing i wanted to talk about which again was is all under the

00:28:46.400 aegis of this year 2025 being an interesting and tumultuous one for you and many other people

00:28:52.980 the other thing that you're writing and talking a lot about is the trump administration and the role

00:28:59.000 of elon musk and etc etc your your former friend and you've pulled no punches that i'm aware of and

00:29:05.840 i'm just my my question is this is not designed to get you to hold forth on your view of where we're

00:29:12.600 going politically more from a contemplative standpoint like what role is there for you

00:29:18.500 and what role would you recommend for others in compassion you know can you conjure compassion

00:29:25.120 for the people politically with whom you disagree so strongly and which what would you recommend to

00:29:31.200 the rest of us yeah i mean it's it's it's worth remembering that that is something that one can do

00:29:37.300 right because it's not the first uh it doesn't it rarely seems like the first order of business

00:29:42.260 is to figure out how to feel compassion for the people who are at least in my view busily um

00:29:48.640 kind of tearing up the framework of the liberal international order i mean like it's just there's

00:29:54.600 so many wires being cut that the likelihood that they're going to cut the wrong ones seems almost

00:30:00.160 certain and um yeah so there's a lot at stake and there's a lot i'm worried about happening that

00:30:07.120 may well happen compassion or not but yeah on some level i i view you know all of these people even

00:30:14.380 even the people who are hardest to feel compassion for as um i mean these are just analogies but you

00:30:20.520 know it's like everyone's a kind of a force of nature right it's like i i don't tend to i'm not

00:30:25.480 really personalizing this it's like i'd be worried about a hurricane you know or the you know the fire we

00:30:31.740 just spoke about like i didn't like the fire but i didn't spend any time feeling hatred for the fire

00:30:37.160 right like hatred was not the mode i'm not i wasn't seething with hatred thinking about this fire right

00:30:43.200 and yet i was well aware of just how much destruction it was causing you know when i when i look at i mean

00:30:50.040 donald trump is somebody who is at the center of all this and you know as you know i'm not a fan

00:30:54.460 i don't spend a lot of time hating donald trump as a person i i hate what i consider his influence to be

00:31:02.440 very much in the way that i would hate the effects of a fire or a hurricane or some force of nature that

00:31:07.380 is it's uh you know to personalize it would be an extra step and to think that it could be other than

00:31:14.720 it is is an extra step that i'm in some ways i'm i might take with other people but i'm definitely not

00:31:20.740 taking it with trump i mean trump is someone who's behaving exactly as i expect him to behave

00:31:27.100 i feel like i understand you know i have never met him but i feel like i you know insofar as i can

00:31:31.560 understand someone from the outside i feel like i do understand him at least in a coarse-grained way

00:31:38.040 the way i understand a fire or a hurricane like this is just going to keep fucking things up

00:31:42.380 for predictable reasons and we want to contain the damage so again i mean i can be worried about

00:31:51.140 possible outcomes i can be you know outraged and in in some ways or you know but i certainly can be

00:31:58.840 outraged by the people who are enabling trump i mean i could i i can be outraged by anyone i mean

00:32:05.100 almost like the arsonists who are kind of adding to the already existing fire but on some level when i

00:32:10.360 when i look at someone like trump i i um i do view him as a kind of a malfunctioning robot or a wild

00:32:17.020 animal has gotten loose in the in the house and you've got a problem but it's not one that where

00:32:22.420 i'm attributing authorship in some way where i'm spending a lot of time thinking he should be doing

00:32:29.420 other than he's doing he has free will you know and he's you know my position on free will i actually

00:32:35.740 don't think anyone has it and i think everyone is just kind of playing out the causes and conditions

00:32:41.160 of their you know mental lives and their entanglement with the world so it's like it's genes and environment

00:32:46.480 and and neurochemistry and you know you can add karma if you want to add you know metaphysical

00:32:52.180 categories from buddhism but it's like it's it's still all the universe doing its thing but i still have a

00:33:00.040 a very clear preference for certain outcomes over other outcomes and i think it's rational to have

00:33:05.000 that preference and it can be can be agitating but it's not i mean i know i know a lot of people would

00:33:10.100 think it was certainly based on what i've said and written that i hate trump right that hatred is the

00:33:16.960 the emotion and no i just i would be happy to never think about him again it's like it's astonishing

00:33:22.680 to me that he is a person who has occupied a decade of our lives collectively and has become this sort of

00:33:28.920 black hole for human attention that you know we can't have we haven't been able to escape right but

00:33:35.380 it's impermanence once again will uh eventually reign here there will come a day where we don't

00:33:40.540 have to think about trump anymore but it's going to be a while the just to echo something you said you

00:33:45.980 know i've had some pushback some some pushback on social media when i talk about the value of

00:33:53.920 compassion in this divisive context and i think that's because people hear that word and think

00:34:00.900 it's synonymous with approbation or giving them a hug or inviting them over for dinner

00:34:07.760 or being a doormat and i actually i think of it as non-hatred at the very least and the hatred

00:34:14.740 doesn't help you stand up or take action you know what what's called for now is for all of us to do

00:34:22.000 our best to be useful in this situation and i don't think the hatred is an asset in this regard

00:34:28.580 i think it actually is a reason why we talk about blind rage and actually with trump it's worse

00:34:35.700 or it's kind of trickier to navigate psychologically and socially because when i see trump on television

00:34:43.060 again i've never met him so i've only seen him on television i understand what his fans are seeing

00:34:50.080 right he's entertaining he's funny and that stuff i mean he he's not persuasive like i i see someone

00:34:57.060 bullshitting and lying with you know greater velocity than than anyone in human history so he's not

00:35:02.780 persuasive for me and and he is clearly persuasive for his fans but he's entertaining right and so so and

00:35:09.960 whenever he's hitting those notes the reward system in my brain is lighting up too it's like i'm not i'm

00:35:15.820 not feeling hey i'm feeling the opposite of hatred i actually like the guy because it's entertaining

00:35:19.880 right it's not boring and so i i'm not totally immune to his charm like he's got a charisma that

00:35:28.000 i understand and that i some part of my brain responds to it i'm just continuing to keep track of the

00:35:34.760 other you know consequences that i care about you know and you know i'm worried that we're all in

00:35:40.920 danger of entertaining ourselves to death on some level yeah i part ways with you just slightly there

00:35:46.720 because you know there are moments i think you and i were talking about this at a dinner we were at

00:35:50.480 recently and i'm going to mention a current event that is recent for us but by the time this posts in

00:35:55.560 a month will probably have been forgotten and the tsunami of whatever fresh outrages await just

00:36:01.840 watching him in the oval office with zelensky and i'm not saying zelensky was blameless here but

00:36:06.440 that was as clear a case in my view of bullying as i've ever seen in public and as somebody who has

00:36:16.260 been bullied in his childhood and was also a bully it really jabbed at some of my cycle i did not find

00:36:22.960 him entertaining or likable in that moment yeah i i mean i guess i even in that moment i find him

00:36:29.000 ridiculous so like there's there's a kind of comic quality to him always like so i the person who i

00:36:36.080 found most repellent in that whole scene was jd vance like jd like so like jd vance actually

00:36:42.980 activated my disgust circuits more effectively there than trump did i mean there's just something so

00:36:50.320 contemptible about you know everything he was contributing to that and and how cynical it i know

00:36:56.700 he must be in order to have found that particular orbit through trump's world i mean because i know

00:37:02.280 he's smarter than that i know he i i know i actually didn't i never read his book hillbilly elegy but i i

00:37:08.220 saw enough of the coverage of it and i saw enough of him at that point when he was launching it that

00:37:12.320 i i know that on some level he knows better right he's much more of a cynical machiavellian operator

00:37:19.960 just nakedly seeking power and his personal advancement trump is like a badly designed mind

00:37:27.520 that is just always seeking the the reward function of you know fame and money you know

00:37:34.640 give me attention and money how do i how does this situation give me attention and money like that's all

00:37:39.340 he's just he's like this the perfect case of add mapped on to a landscape where attention and money

00:37:48.460 are possible outcomes you know and you just set him loose on that landscape and this is what you get

00:37:54.120 and and he he is a ridiculous you know he has no imposter syndrome right he's but he's constantly in a

00:38:01.400 situation which he's an actual imposter he's even an imposter billionaire even after having earned

00:38:09.060 billions he manages to be a fake billionaire even when he's now a legitimate billionaire or at least on

00:38:14.620 paper he must be a legitimate billionaire you know he was he used to be a fake billionaire

00:38:18.460 but like the guy has lied about every aspect of every part of reality that has touched his life

00:38:24.520 so many times and so incessantly and so incoherently that it's just he's a fabrication of a fabrication i

00:38:31.820 mean he's on some level and this is why compassion is actually hard to map onto him you know it's much

00:38:36.240 easier for me to connect the dots and say okay i can feel compassion for this terrible person who just

00:38:42.380 committed you know a triple murder right like i can get that life story and and say okay well i can

00:38:48.520 understand that if i had that though you know those genes and that life opportunity lack of life

00:38:53.580 opportunity and you know been mistreated by my parents in that way etc etc and growing up in that

00:38:57.980 crime-ridden you know neighborhood whatever whatever the story is i too could have been that person

00:39:02.840 right and and there are many cases like that and then you can easily feel compassion for just

00:39:07.720 this person on some level is unlucky to be who they are right and that extends all the way to

00:39:14.100 someone like saddam hussein right it's just like this is on some level he was unlucky to be who he was

00:39:18.560 trump is such an odd object that i find him he really is just a sui generis case of you know i

00:39:27.920 again this is this is just me imagining what it's like to be him because i really don't know but

00:39:32.220 i wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't suffer in the ways you would think any human being would suffer

00:39:39.680 it's like like he's just missing something he's missing a moral a moral and emotional architecture

00:39:46.880 somehow in his mind such that i just don't think he's processing relationships and life outcomes the

00:39:53.180 way normal people are you know if we could scan his brain and and discover actually he's he doesn't

00:39:59.840 suffer you know his lack of connection to people and he's you know you're you you're um any sort

00:40:07.040 of a buddhist imagining that he's you know that on some level he's in pain is actually not true you

00:40:13.020 know like there are people who don't feel pain physical pain right and it's a very bad outcome

00:40:17.580 like you know they bang their hands into the corner of a table or whatever and get an injury and they

00:40:22.820 don't don't feel it right you know maybe there are people who don't feel psychological pain

00:40:26.280 in ways that would surprise us he's just incredibly odd you know and so i do view him more as a i

00:40:35.660 certainly wouldn't want to be him right like i would feel very unlucky if i you know i would i would not

00:40:40.420 want to trade so on that level i feel that he's you know an appropriate object of compassion because i

00:40:45.680 think he's unlucky on some level to be who he is and and that's a very strange thing to say about

00:40:51.000 the most powerful person on earth and one of the most famous people in human history and the person

00:40:57.780 who if you stand back and look at it is probably getting more of what he wants than almost anybody

00:41:04.640 it's like he on some level he's the most successful person i can think of yeah when you just think of

00:41:11.000 what his appetites are and what he's managed to achieve he certainly his comeback politically is

00:41:16.620 without question the greatest political comeback i can think of i mean you know i you know if there

00:41:22.280 are others that even compare i couldn't name them it's just astonishing like on some level we're all

00:41:28.320 living in his dream world and yet he is so obviously barely human like he's missing something so

00:41:36.140 fundamental and it's so obvious and again i can't say this if someone like saddam hussein or osama bin

00:41:42.700 laden or people who are just obviously worse people on so many other levels right he's just not a normal

00:41:48.840 person right and some of those people were you know i i you know i think there are some terrible people

00:41:53.960 who've created immense harm who are psychologically normal people yeah there was that enough trump

00:42:00.260 derangement syndrome for you okay i started just just when i thought i ran out of things to say

00:42:07.860 about donald trump you ask a question you invoked free will and i'm going to bring this back up

00:42:14.320 with some hesitation because it could take over the rest of this conversation you and i have talked you

00:42:20.540 probably don't remember it but we've had many discussions about free will and i still don't

00:42:25.260 understand your point fully and i get so let me just ask it from a very basic standpoint just because

00:42:31.460 i'm trying to represent the listener who might have heard you say within the context of discussing

00:42:36.140 compassion that we don't have free will so then if i've made the decision after listening to this

00:42:41.980 conversation to practice more non-hatred in my navigation of the american political landscape or if i

00:42:48.720 after listening to this conversation make the affirmative decision to download the waking up app

00:42:53.120 at wakingup.com slash 10 if i make those decisions are those predetermined or do i have some agency and

00:43:01.420 deserve therefore some credit for having done the right thing well it's not that they're

00:43:07.060 predetermined i mean so there's there's some question about just whether there's an important

00:43:13.140 contribution of randomness in this clockwork universe or or if it's deterministic or some

00:43:18.560 combination combination of the two i mean at the scale at which we live right i mean leaving kind of

00:43:23.120 quantum indeterminacy aside at the scale of our living there's obviously a lot of determinism

00:43:29.420 right there's a lot of just one domino hitting the next and they go down in predictable ways and i

00:43:36.040 just jump in on that i apologize but so by determinism you mean there's this incalculable

00:43:41.600 gumbo of past prior past causes and conditions that have led us to this moment and we are acting out our

00:43:49.580 past conditioning without much agency whatsoever yeah yeah or just that even what you're calling agency

00:43:56.680 agency is just more dominoes falling right so like like your preference for certain outcomes is what

00:44:02.820 it is you know we know you're going to choose the chocolate over the vegemite because you hate

00:44:07.980 vegemite right so like are you free to choose the vegemite well yeah but you hate vegemite did you pick

00:44:14.040 that no right so like like you you can always step back you know one domino prior and realize okay i

00:44:20.940 didn't choose that like this landscape upon which my choices seem to be emerging and becoming effective

00:44:28.840 is already built for me by prior causes you know and these causes are genetic and environmental and

00:44:35.660 that's really the totality of causes materially in the case of a you know a human being is deciding

00:44:40.560 things if you want to add something ethereal to that you know a soul or you know a mind that is in

00:44:46.980 some way divorceable from the workings of the brain that's fine but again you didn't create those

00:44:52.420 things either right the you that is is the experiencer didn't pick your soul you can't account

00:44:57.720 for the fact that you don't have the soul of a psychopath or the soul of somebody who's crazy

00:45:01.640 enough to prefer vegemite over chocolate right so like you're you had you you have the causes and

00:45:07.820 conditions you have in this moment you know mental and physical locked and loaded ready to go and now

00:45:13.660 now you're confronted with the next apparent choice and you will do what you will do and even if you

00:45:21.740 seem to like you let's say you 99 times out of 100 you make the decision one way but one time out of

00:45:28.960 100 you decide to just do something new right do something out of character right do like oh i'm gonna

00:45:34.700 go for the vegemite now just because sam said i wouldn't right even that maneuver is coming out of

00:45:41.240 something that you can't inspect that you didn't create that is a prior condition you know at some

00:45:47.760 state of your to bring it back to its material antecedents just you know some state of neuro

00:45:53.260 curious neurochemistry in your brain in that moment which again you didn't author and yet we know it is

00:46:00.000 the effective thing that is leading to this one in a hundred choice in this case so yeah so if our

00:46:06.160 conversation has an effect on a listener right and they want to do something as a result or not

00:46:11.660 they're not choosing that outcome if i say something persuasive and someone is persuaded by it

00:46:20.620 right they're not choosing to be persuaded you know if i say something that is interesting and someone

00:46:27.920 finds it interesting they're not choosing to find it interesting if i say something that's deadly boring

00:46:33.080 or confusing or what however it strikes the listener the listener hasn't chosen to have that reaction

00:46:39.600 and if they decided to say oh you know fuck you i'm going to choose a different reaction right now

00:46:45.060 right kind of you know you know samuel johnson's famous retort to philosophical idealism like he just

00:46:51.220 kicked a stone and said you know i i refute him thusly he was you know refuting the idealism of bishop

00:46:56.140 barclay that's not really an adequate response right because that too is subsumed by this same

00:47:03.120 analysis okay so then let me put it i mean all of that actually does make sense to me i am relentlessly

00:47:10.280 practical though and i'm always thinking about like what especially on on the part of the listener

00:47:15.460 what does this have to do with my lived experience and improving my life and so if free will is as you

00:47:22.100 describe it an illusion and you make a very convincing case you you are the proprietor of an

00:47:27.540 app that purports to be a kind of workout for the brain and the mind we are sitting here talking

00:47:32.780 about the power of cultivating non-hatred in the face of what many people find to be outrageous

00:47:38.240 and equanimity in the face of non-negotiable impermanence and entropy is there no free will in

00:47:45.500 any of that or that seems like affirmative decisions to train the mind and the heart in order to get better

00:47:51.320 in life yeah yeah well let me answer that question in a second but the the low-hanging fruit in your

00:47:56.540 question is seeing things this way i mean just dispensing with the a belief in free will is a

00:48:02.260 direct antidote to hatred because the moment you see people acting out that just kind of helplessly

00:48:09.920 acting out the prior causes and conditions of of their mind streams you do view them like you'd view

00:48:16.980 you know a fire or a hurricane or a wild animal like that even though you wish they would do

00:48:21.700 otherwise they can't do otherwise on some basic level or they couldn't do otherwise until that

00:48:26.320 moment so i mean the difference between obvious difference between a person and a fire is some

00:48:31.680 people you can you can reason with right some people you can intrude upon their behavior with

00:48:36.240 ideas with conversation or or just with you know other inducements i mean with with you know incentives

00:48:41.340 you can punish them you can find them you can threaten them with prison right like like people can be

00:48:45.860 influenced in the way that forces of nature can't and that's what on some level one of the things that

00:48:50.960 makes us human i mean that's how we're different from wild animals but yet those influences are still

00:48:57.220 more mechanism it's more it's like it's it you know whether or not the conversation is going to work

00:49:02.600 is still left to the this mix of causes and conditions right but i i do find it to be when i put

00:49:08.720 this lens on my view of human events hatred is the first thing that drops out like like it just

00:49:15.300 hatred makes no sense right even for the worst person doing the the worst thing you know directly

00:49:21.320 to me again the moment i think in these terms now i'm dealing with a grizzly bear on some level right

00:49:28.160 it's like okay you know you can fear a grizzly bear you can you know you can run away you can kill a

00:49:33.820 grizzly bear you can there's all kinds of things that that are relevant to that emergency but hatred

00:49:39.520 is not one of those things right it just makes no sense to hate a grizzly bear no matter what it's

00:49:44.040 doing right because a grizzly bear of course is going to act like a grizzly bear but in terms of

00:49:49.280 so in like taking you know deciding to meditate or deliberately you know reminding yourself to pay

00:49:55.320 attention hey i mean the truth is we i often talk about it in these terms it gives you a degree of

00:50:00.640 freedom that you wouldn't otherwise have right so like the moment you can be mindful you have this

00:50:05.500 superpower where you can on some level you can decide well do i want to stay angry right now or

00:50:11.160 do i is anger actually not useful and it's just can i just decide to get off the ride right now you

00:50:17.700 know and when once you when you have a practice you can actually do that but again we were you know

00:50:22.800 earlier in this conversation we were talking about all these moments in life that are not functioning

00:50:28.640 like mindful mindfulness alarms sufficient to remind us to pay attention right and so the

00:50:34.480 it's always mysterious what causes you to wake up in the midst of your life like what what actually

00:50:41.600 you know you're you're going along you're going along not noticing much of anything just reacting

00:50:46.220 to everything that you're lost in thought and then a moment of mindfulness comes online and you

00:50:51.860 recognize okay well the you know you thoughts a thought and you just let it pass away and you see that

00:50:56.820 the emotion that it was connected to is this separate kind of pattern of energy in the body

00:51:01.840 and you you notice that it's changing and that gives you this distance from just the mere reactivity

00:51:09.180 and it gives you an opportunity to deliberately seemingly deliberately pay attention to something

00:51:13.840 else or to continue to pay attention just to your the flow of your experience and to feel the

00:51:18.800 freedom in that to feel the distance from the the reactivity to you know in this case anger

00:51:23.020 to notice that the mind is a wider space in which anger is is appearing right there's more to you

00:51:28.380 than just this contraction and the moment you notice that the behavioral imperative that the the need

00:51:35.020 to sound angry and look angry and act angry that relaxes right and so all of a sudden you have this

00:51:40.080 you have a choice that you know quote choice that you wouldn't otherwise have had you can decide okay

00:51:44.860 maybe i'm not going to say that thing that's just going to derange my relationship with this person or

00:51:49.240 you know maybe i'm maybe i'm not going to honk you know at the driver ahead of me because i'm pissed

00:51:54.280 off so there's this degree of quote freedom that opens up based on having that practice but again the

00:52:00.980 the occurrence of that remembering or that salience or that recognition of the character of experience in

00:52:08.520 that moment is still mysterious right like you didn't author that moment of recognition it just came

00:52:17.100 right it's like a sound it's a visitation on your mind stream it's a change that you didn't author and

00:52:24.440 yet it follows causally from things that happened before i mean all the practice you did before all the

00:52:31.240 books you read before all the conversations like this you had before all the the mechanics of remembering

00:52:37.100 to be mindful that you have built into your life is the thing that is going to make you more mindful

00:52:42.180 in the future so the causality is demonstrably true i mean we just know that if if you hit your

00:52:48.200 hand with a hammer you're you know your hand's going to be injured and it's going to be you'll

00:52:51.700 have pain in your hand tomorrow and you know mindfulness is a is just as causally integrated in

00:52:59.320 your actually in your physical body as all that right i mean this is you know on some level the

00:53:05.160 practice of mindfulness the propensity to remember to be mindful is just a physical change that has

00:53:12.460 been introduced in your brain at some point in the past right and it's getting ramified the more you do

00:53:17.480 it but again the sense that there's this separable you that is the locus of a an ethereal freedom of

00:53:24.900 will that is something other than the causal mechanism of you know everything else and somehow loosely

00:53:32.560 integrated with it right it's like riding around in the pineal gland or somewhere in the brain where

00:53:37.420 it's you know pulling these very you know gossamer levers and biasing you know the experience one way

00:53:44.640 or the other while not itself being just merely part of the causal clockwork there's just no reason to

00:53:51.580 believe in the existence of such a thing right there's no will that's free from the universe that's free

00:53:57.680 from again this ocean of causes and conditions that we're all riding on at any given moment but just

00:54:03.920 on a very practical level the free free will may be an illusion but it is used for the listener what

00:54:12.120 they need to know is ride what feels like your agency to make good decisions to improve the quality of

00:54:19.660 your life that may actually lead you to a visceral experience of the illusion of the self and free

00:54:25.860 will yeah yeah so i mean i would say that it's totally appropriate and natural to think in terms of

00:54:32.740 growing more free to live the way you want to live the more you practice because so much of our failure to

00:54:40.980 be happy it's not a matter of our not knowing how to be happy it's on some level it's a failure

00:54:47.160 to take our own advice on some level like like it's very easy to give other people advice

00:54:52.460 like we know like if your friend's unhappy and he comes to you with like he puts the disorder of his

00:54:57.280 life in front of you right his relationships his career his habitual ways of responding to stress

00:55:03.940 you know his diet his exercise like all of it it would take you five minutes to give him very sound

00:55:11.460 wise actionable advice that if he could only follow it would materially improve his life right so it's

00:55:17.620 not to say that you could solve you know anyone's problems perfectly but i mean the best practices are

00:55:23.340 so obvious 90 of the time we know exactly what's good for us right we know the thing that we could do

00:55:30.200 that we wouldn't regret and we know the thing that we could do that we will regret right and and so it's

00:55:35.260 not a mystery right and we have the information but so much of our day-to-day frustration with

00:55:42.380 ourselves and our lives and our just kind of the the sense of inadequacy in the sense that you know

00:55:47.180 this day was not nearly as good as it should have been is a result of our failure to do what we know we

00:55:53.920 we wanted to do anyway right moment to moment i mean on some of those it's a failure to have made our

00:56:00.080 minds our friends we treat ourselves again i'm using language that can't really be justified

00:56:05.980 because there's not many of us in there but on some level we live in relationship to ourselves

00:56:11.260 right and we treat ourselves in ways that we would never treat a friend right you would never talk

00:56:16.500 to your friend the way you talk to yourself about the thing that just happened or the thing that you

00:56:21.140 just did right so on some level it's a practice is a matter of becoming your own wise compassionate

00:56:28.800 best friend more and more of the time right like so you're like you're riding shotgun with your

00:56:34.100 with yourself and like always giving good advice and you know putting your hand on the wheel in a way

00:56:41.920 that actually solves the problem right rather than just makes it more excruciating and that is it's

00:56:50.060 appropriate to think of all of that as becoming freer and being granted more choice a greater range of

00:56:58.600 choices in each moment right like you're just you're not condemned to be the schmuck you were

00:57:04.120 a moment ago if you can practice if you can't practice you will be that schmuck for as long as

00:57:10.700 that schmuck just has the like the half-life of schmuckery will be what whatever it is in your case

00:57:16.180 and maybe you'll get diverted by you know an ice cream cone or like something else will happen and

00:57:20.820 you'll you'll be you'll you'll have a different experience but if you have no perspective on

00:57:26.440 the flow of thought right as just appear an appearance in your consciousness if you've never

00:57:33.260 seen an alternative but to be identified with the next thought that arises if you don't know

00:57:38.740 anything about meditation what i just said makes absolutely no sense right like what are you what

00:57:42.500 does it mean to be identified with a thought and right but what mindfulness is is is a practice that

00:57:48.980 allows you to break that spell of identification like you know you know otherwise you're is very much

00:57:54.560 analogous to being asleep and dreaming and not knowing it's a dream if you're asleep and dreaming

00:57:59.040 you know leaving lucid dreams aside you don't know you're dreaming you are condemned to experience

00:58:05.260 whatever your imagination is going to foist on you for that period right like you're going to meet

00:58:10.560 whoever you're going to meet they're going to be as scary or as desirable or as whatever is there

00:58:15.240 they're going to be you're going to have whatever reaction you're going to have you know you're

00:58:19.940 going to be completely psychotic for this period because you don't know you're dreaming like you're

00:58:23.740 safely in bed and you simply don't know that you have no reality testing going on at all in your

00:58:29.120 in your mind i mean it really is if you map it into the waking state it's pure psychosis every time

00:58:34.860 you're lost in thought identified with thought you know thinking about the the conversation you're

00:58:39.400 about to have that's making you know about what you're anxious or the the thing that's going to

00:58:43.480 happen tomorrow that you're you know not looking forward to or the thing that happened yesterday that

00:58:47.480 you regret every time you're just thinking that you're the person just in the grip of that

00:58:52.680 thought it's very close to being asleep and dreaming without knowing that you're dreaming

00:58:56.840 and so this notion of waking up i mean you know we called the app waking up because it's more than

00:59:01.900 an analogy it's like it is it's and this is obviously it's traditional reference to buddhism and

00:59:06.720 every other contemplative path that has had something like meditation at the heart of it i mean

00:59:11.780 the buddha was the awakened one i mean it's like the notion of waking up from the dream

00:59:15.960 of normal life it's very direct and so yeah it's not it's not wrong to think of all of this in terms

00:59:24.040 of getting more freedom to live the way you want to live to pay attention to what you want to pay

00:59:28.860 attention to to to have the experience you want and yet at the core of this practice and this path

00:59:36.260 there's an insight that can seem to subvert all of that but it subverts it in a very beautiful and

00:59:42.180 happiness producing way which is there's no you doing this there's no separate self there's no

00:59:48.760 rider on on the horse of consciousness you know pulling the reins and making these choices there's

00:59:56.040 just experience right there's just the flow of experience and on some level all of this is the

01:00:01.840 universe waking up where you are right like it's it's the universe is aware of itself in your case

01:00:09.520 right and you're and you're not separate from it and the sense that you are separate from it

01:00:13.360 is another instance of what it's like to not recognize a thought as a thought you've really

01:00:20.380 beautifully articulated the fact that you're sort of riding the flawed horse of ego all the way to

01:00:28.180 seeing that the ego or the sense of i doesn't exist in the first place and so we have now arrived at a

01:00:35.500 point in this conversation that uh we arrive at every time we we have a conversation which is this

01:00:41.620 sense that a lot of people find deeply counterintuitive that the self is an illusion which you're

01:00:47.160 arguing in many contemplative traditions argue is not only true but also deeply helpful and on the

01:00:53.320 waking up app you in taking your introduction course you like you start off with very traditional

01:00:59.700 mindfulness teaching it's i dan i'm watching my breath coming to go in meditation and then over

01:01:06.240 the course of this four week introduction you start to switch things so that we're investigating

01:01:12.260 what is this sense of i dan that's watching this breath for those of us who haven't had a chance to

01:01:18.940 take the course yet are there any simple instructions that would allow us to maybe just get a glimpse

01:01:25.520 into this illusion so that we have some sense of what the fuck you're talking about

01:01:31.040 yeah well it's um i mean it can be frustrating for people because so there's a there's a very

01:01:36.960 straightforward and easily understood and not at all at least in principle frustrating version of the

01:01:46.700 path right i mean like you can the ordinary what i call you know dualistic mindfulness practice

01:01:53.460 it's very easy to teach it's very easy to learn it's not i mean it can be frustrating to practice

01:01:59.080 because your your mind is out of control right you try to meditate and you get lost in thought and

01:02:03.280 then five minutes later you remember you were supposed to be meditating then you come back to the breath

01:02:06.960 and but there's nothing paradoxical about it right like you you understand your mind's out of control

01:02:12.160 you're now training attention on an object of meditation like the breath and eventually you can pay

01:02:17.880 attention to anything sounds and sensations and moods and even thoughts themselves but it's a

01:02:23.420 practice it's like learning the piano your first day on the piano you understand you don't know how to

01:02:29.300 play the thing and you're it's going to take many many hours and lots of repetitions to learn how to do it

01:02:34.980 and it's a very kind of linear progressive path like you start in ignorance and you gradually accumulate

01:02:42.880 skill and knowledge and you can see and feel and hear the consequences of all that and so it is with

01:02:50.920 meditation you can build concentration you can you can become a more seasoned student of your own mind

01:02:58.420 and you can notice progress and again there's nothing strange and and hard to understand about

01:03:05.840 that whole process it can take longer than you want it can be harder than you want you may feel like

01:03:10.540 you don't have um you know the natural talent for it that you wish you had right that's again so you can

01:03:16.200 map this onto piano or sports or anything else you you know these are all things you learn and

01:03:21.440 gradually sometimes all too gradually you know which is to say very very slowly and with great effort you get

01:03:27.220 better at these things but the the real truth of this path and the thing you really ultimately wake

01:03:33.800 up to the thing you get glimpses of you know even dualistically along the way subverts all of that

01:03:40.000 because unlike piano and unlike sports and unlike anything else you learn the thing you're becoming

01:03:47.760 acquainted with in meditation the thing the goal of the practice the thing you're trying to recognize and

01:03:53.620 and and ultimately never lose sight of is already here right it's already the nature of your mind

01:04:01.020 right it's already what consciousness is like prior to your identification with thought right so it's

01:04:07.360 not it can seem you know dualistically that you're in the self-improvement business right like this

01:04:12.220 we now have a practice very much analogous to you know physical exercise right like you're you start out

01:04:18.880 you're not in shape and you go to the go to the gym and you'll meet a trainer and now there's a path

01:04:24.840 by which you could actually get to be in shape and even in great shape and you can see the you know the

01:04:29.040 posters on the walls of all the people who got there before you who just got her in fantastic shape and so

01:04:33.960 there's no illusion like like however hard it is it's possible to get there and so it is with the

01:04:39.580 mind you can become you know if not the buddha something very much like the buddha right you could you can

01:04:44.220 become free you just have to kind of gradually train your mind but the thing is the punch line

01:04:50.660 of this is that it really isn't this progressive thing in the end there's this reality to the mind

01:04:58.180 there's this consciousness is a certain way and meditation is recognizing it to be that way a moment

01:05:04.660 of a really successful moment of meditation is just a recognition of what is already the case

01:05:10.200 right so there is a paradox here you're not actually going anywhere you're not schlepping up

01:05:15.680 to the top of the mountain you're not really at the base of the mountain and the peak isn't really

01:05:19.800 far away and there isn't really a path from here to there and on some level if you think about it in

01:05:25.940 those terms you can never get from here to there thinking about it in those dualistic terms in more

01:05:32.840 and more subtle ways becomes the impediment to actually making progress and the progress is to

01:05:39.940 recognize that the path is already accomplished in this moment that the goal that you would otherwise

01:05:45.360 seek is not only available now it is the thing that would be doing the seeking right like it is all it is

01:05:52.080 what you are in this moment i mean it is the nature of your mind it is what consciousness is in this moment

01:05:58.660 consciousness is already free of an ego right it's not like there's an ego really and you somehow get

01:06:06.020 rid of it through diligent practice no that diligent practice or some combination of happy accidents

01:06:12.680 will get you to recognize that the ego is an illusion right and to say that it's an illusion is to say that

01:06:18.440 it's not actually here in the way that it seems to be so it's not a matter of getting rid of it

01:06:23.400 again so that's where all of this becomes harder to understand but it's nonetheless true and it also

01:06:33.140 suggests that the promise of this paradox is that you're actually not far away from your goal like

01:06:39.580 the sense that you might be condemned to just never get there right is you know it's like i mean that

01:06:47.960 you know that effectively that will be the case for some people obviously but we don't stand

01:06:52.820 in relation to this you know spiritual insight in this quite the same place that we might be with

01:07:00.160 respect to these other things i just mentioned like piano like for someone like myself it would

01:07:03.800 be totally rational for me to wonder well even if i just devoted my life to playing the piano

01:07:08.460 maybe i just won't be able to play it right or just like or i'll just but we'll play it so badly

01:07:14.800 that will it will be objectively true to say well that was a waste of your time right like you had so

01:07:21.240 little aptitude for that project that you just you basically wasted your life trying to do something

01:07:26.360 that would be very easy for somebody else but it's just it was going to be insuperably hard for you

01:07:31.300 right but that's my you know not having tried the piano but it uh that would be a fair bet for my own

01:07:38.200 you know my own musical aptitude with this this again this is the nature of your mind already like

01:07:45.360 there's already no ego in the center of your experience and the sense that there is one is

01:07:51.360 a misperception and meditation is the process seemingly gradual in the beginning but in some

01:07:59.040 sense not even a process in the end by which that becomes more and more obvious and you know i think

01:08:06.420 everyone is in that condition whether they they know it or not right so it's you know you can make you

01:08:12.860 make a lot of progress very very quickly which is to say it's like you can suddenly become a great

01:08:17.700 pianist like every time you walk into you sit down at the piano at this piano it is rational to believe

01:08:25.620 i might actually just blast into rachmaninoff today like yesterday i i didn't even know what the notes

01:08:33.000 were but like the full performance is in fact possible in principle right now and that is you know we

01:08:40.980 all have different kind of spiritual biographies here but kind of the step change in practice that

01:08:47.320 many people have experienced carries with it the insight that oh this could have happened a long time

01:08:53.560 ago right like there was no good reason it took this long if waking up is unusual as a curriculum

01:09:01.660 i think this piece is unusual like i'm even from the very beginning i'm trying to communicate the fact

01:09:08.220 that this paradoxically close already accomplished reality to this whole project is there from the

01:09:15.340 very beginning this may seem hard and it may in fact be hard for most people most of the time but

01:09:20.340 you can get to the punchline far sooner than you would expect and in the end there's no good reason

01:09:26.660 why it didn't happen sooner yeah i completely get that and i think what makes waking up unique

01:09:31.480 is that you are front loading with the punchline and arguing that instead of this bottom-up process of

01:09:38.300 climbing arduously this mountain of dualistic mindfulness i'm i'm gonna grit my teeth and you

01:09:45.880 know with mad dog intensity and try to be aware of every breath to the best of my ability that

01:09:51.200 actually what you're looking for this insight that we're looking for is close at hand and you

01:09:57.780 you really i think quite skillfully get us there although as you were saying before we started

01:10:04.600 rolling sometimes there's a moment in the intro course when people you know revolt a little bit

01:10:10.340 because you're asking us to turn our attention back at oh who's the self that's feeling the breath

01:10:18.220 yeah so i guess my question is kind of a repetition of the question i asked earlier for the listener now

01:10:24.380 what is the mental move we can make that might get us in the neighborhood of this maddeningly close

01:10:30.500 realization that we should have had years ago yeah well it's always some version there are many ways

01:10:37.620 to say this or not that many ways but a few ways to say this and i employ all of them but it is some

01:10:44.640 version of looking for what is looking it's looking for the seat of attention it's turning attention

01:10:50.620 upon itself it's looking for the looker it's looking for the self it's looking for the mind

01:10:55.420 it's looking for the thinker of thoughts right so it's there's all just a way of saying that the sense

01:11:00.440 that we have our default sense of being the subject of experience being a point from which attention

01:11:08.960 can be aimed at experience you know that we're separate from experience right like i tell you you know

01:11:15.380 notice a sound or notice the breath or notice your visual field most people by default feel like

01:11:21.520 okay i'm over here behind my eyes behind my face paying attention now i'm now aiming attention at the

01:11:28.960 visual field right visual fields out there i'm in here behind my face or you know if i close my eyes

01:11:34.900 i can pay attention to the breath the breath is down there you know in the abdomen or at the tip of

01:11:39.620 my nose and i'm up here in my head and i'm this locus of conscious attention that can be again and

01:11:46.440 this is also the seat this is the sense of self it's where this the free will if it exists would

01:11:50.920 be hiding right like this is the the feeling of being not just in the world but in one's body in

01:11:57.820 the world right because most people don't feel identical to their bodies they don't inhabit their

01:12:02.180 bodies down to the tips of their fingers and the tips of their toes they're like passengers in

01:12:06.380 their bodies their mind in a body and then the body is in some sense a part of the world to which

01:12:12.580 you have a relationship you know and it can be quite a you know complicated and fraught relationship

01:12:16.820 and your aches and pains are yours but they're being appropriated from a place that's outside the

01:12:22.840 aches and pains right like if my hand hurts the problem is out there or down there and i'm up here

01:12:29.120 now in this resisting the pain right and wondering how to get rid of it and you know should i take more

01:12:34.700 advil and just how much advil can you take in a day without destroying your stomach and uh should i

01:12:39.280 call a doctor and you know like just what what's the name of that bone in the hand that i like so

01:12:43.720 now you're thinking about your hand and you're now in relationship to this whole thing that's that you

01:12:48.600 know in the abstract you say yeah well my hand is part of me right i i know i know conceptually that

01:12:53.680 i am my body say but it doesn't feel that way there is this dualism even internal to the body so if

01:13:00.120 you look for the seat of this dualism the the place from which everything is being measured

01:13:04.420 there's this sense of being a subject right and that is the starting point for 99.99 percent of

01:13:10.680 meditators right now that's the one who's going to become a meditator that's the one who's going to

01:13:15.200 practice that's the one who's going to be bad at this practice in the beginning and hope to get

01:13:19.880 better at it and you know that's the one who's going to remember to be mindful when he remembers and

01:13:24.340 that's the one who's noticing a thought as a thought and is no longer identical to that thought

01:13:29.680 that thought suddenly becomes like the hand you know it's something to which you're in relationship

01:13:33.540 but there's still this feeling of me over here in the head paying attention right that's the thing

01:13:39.180 that has to continually be inspected and what would do the inspecting it's that thing it's like

01:13:44.860 the thing that's paying attention is now being asked to turn to look for itself right and in some

01:13:50.280 sense that turning is seems impossible or it's like how would you do that like how how would you

01:13:56.300 look for what is looking right and it's true it is a kind of a paradoxical instruction and it's not

01:14:01.500 like you ever really turn clear around and see you know the absence of this thing there's something

01:14:08.040 about this goad to turning this you know look for what is looking or look for the mind or look for

01:14:13.180 the thinker or look for the self or to use a more concrete version of it which we have in the app

01:14:19.020 douglas harding uh who who is this kind of self-created uh zen he was very influenced by

01:14:25.320 zen and he's sort of in the zen he's on the zen shelf of the bookstore but he's a very creative

01:14:31.020 kind of self-taught teacher he urged you to look for your head right he and he wrote this very uh

01:14:39.480 enjoyable and very short book uh on having no head because he he realized that you know he was

01:14:45.940 it happened to be in india looking at the himalayas and he was looking at this vast scene

01:14:52.020 of sky and mountaintops and suddenly recognized that he didn't see his head like where his head

01:14:59.580 was supposed to be there was just the world there was just sky and mountain you know snowy mountains

01:15:04.400 and you know he could look down he could see his body terminating up into this vastness of the

01:15:10.220 visual field but he he he realized he never saw his head right and he used that as a kind of anchor

01:15:16.380 point like just looking for your head you know like like you and i are having this conversation now

01:15:20.620 you can notice that the only head you see is mine like your your head is not part of your experience

01:15:26.760 it's just this this openness where like my head is appearing and the rest of the world is appearing

01:15:32.320 but what you're intuiting as you to be your head is just this open circumstance where everything else

01:15:40.220 can appear right and as you fall back into that sense of just openness right you can begin to sense

01:15:47.300 this thing that i'm talking about which is that there's no center to experience right we we have as

01:15:52.980 this default sense that we're the center of our experience right and that we're appropriating

01:15:58.520 everything sights sounds sensations thoughts emotions from this place of being the center

01:16:04.200 this sort of indigestible core of of conscious experience but there is no center if you look for

01:16:09.980 the center it can drop away and it's in that dropping away that you recognize something about

01:16:16.040 the character of consciousness prior to identification with thought right because the you know i think it's

01:16:21.220 true to say that this sense of a center is on some level a very subtle thought that is an undercurrent

01:16:26.900 of thought that's always present right and it's even a thought in relation to other thoughts like

01:16:31.540 you notice you can become mindful of thoughts but you if there's still the feeling that you're being

01:16:35.920 mindful of thoughts that's another thought that's going uninspected right so there's this you know it's

01:16:40.860 not a verbose thought it's more like a almost like an energetic contraction it's like a it's like a kind

01:16:46.760 of fist that is formed in the mind whereas there's this alternative which is just an open hand

01:16:52.500 you're continually contracting into the sense of identification and reaction you know like you're

01:17:00.000 you feel that you're you know you have no perspective on this next arising thought

01:17:04.620 like this feels like me you know this feels like me this feels like like like suddenly i'm the guy you

01:17:09.360 know it's the voice in the head that says like why did she put it there right like like what the

01:17:14.360 fuck like like that voice is there's an energetics to not noticing the arising of that thought to

01:17:21.500 suddenly being captured by it and it's it's almost it's the energetics of a kind of contraction it's

01:17:26.220 like you're you know it's occluding what you can otherwise be aware of it's it's it's very much like

01:17:32.700 falling back into a dream you know like like all of a sudden like why the fuck did she put it there

01:17:37.520 like that's the dream like that's an instance of the dream right you know like you you didn't see

01:17:42.540 it come you know it's you didn't produce it you didn't author it like but this next thought or you

01:17:47.660 just have this you know you'd suddenly remember oh my god i just i left that thing that i was

01:17:51.960 supposed to bring like and you didn't see it arise and again it's you just dip back down into the

01:17:57.680 dreamscape of okay everything else about your circumstances is now going unnoticed and you're

01:18:04.880 just in this very brief dream of fuck i forgot that thing it's gonna take me 45 minutes to drive

01:18:10.820 this traffic now and i'm out of time i'm fucking out of time like and so that this that conversation

01:18:18.580 is happening and like you're that right that's a dream right and and mindfulness is a waking up

01:18:24.260 from that dream but the dualistic version of waking up from that which is like okay that's just

01:18:30.340 a thought but it still feels like me over here doing the waking up right like i'm i'm aware of thought

01:18:36.960 i'm aware of that reaction i'm aware of the memory i'm aware of the tension in my body i'm letting go

01:18:42.800 of it now and i can let go of it now because i have this degree of freedom because now i know how to

01:18:47.000 meditate right but it's still me the meditator this turnabout in consciousness where you notice that

01:18:52.940 there is no one who's doing it that there's no center to experience that is the first taste of this

01:18:59.640 real like uncreated freedom like this is not something you're doing anymore this is just the way

01:19:06.360 consciousness is you're discovering an openness that you don't have to produce that you can't improve

01:19:12.740 that you're not it's just what's there prior to identification with thought right it's prior to

01:19:18.500 your contraction it's prior to your reaction it's a thing that you can then be mindful of

01:19:24.540 because it's always present you know in the same way that experience in every other way is always

01:19:30.180 present but it's this is the condition of all experience right this is the thing like and this

01:19:35.940 is what the reason why it's non-dual and it's this is now kind of we're just throwing people into the

01:19:42.320 deep end of the pool here so you know for apologies for the confusion that some people might be feeling

01:19:47.600 but you know it's non-dual in a variety of ways it's non-dual because you're cutting through the

01:19:51.840 dualism of subject object perception right like you're you're recognizing there's no subject

01:19:56.100 so that there's really just experience right you're not on the edge of experience you're not

01:20:00.560 in the center of experience there's not one who's having the experience there's just experience and

01:20:05.420 you're identical to it right there's just consciousness and its contents and you are that condition of

01:20:10.580 everything appearing right like there's just this whatever this is so it's non-dual in the sense that

01:20:15.900 the dichotomy of subject and object is the thing you're you're releasing and what's left is this

01:20:22.680 to call it two is wrong it's not subject and object anymore but to even to call it one thing

01:20:29.260 is also wrong i mean that kind of reifies it it's not just one thing it's this inexpressible open

01:20:36.740 totality of it's not one it's not many and this is why the buddhists use terms like emptiness right

01:20:43.120 and it's a very difficult and confusing thing to translate into english but the basic concept of

01:20:48.940 shunyata in sanskrit allows for this inscrutable prior condition of it's not just one thing because

01:20:57.280 the full diversity of of appearances is present right like anything can appear the character of

01:21:03.520 experience is still fully you know you're not cut off from anything right like there's a full energy

01:21:09.280 of sights and sounds and sensations right so it's not just a a gray goo that gets you know unified but

01:21:15.620 sort of allows for many things but it's not because there's no there's no subject over here

01:21:23.020 appropriating those things or in relationship to those things it's no longer dualistic right so it's

01:21:28.900 not one it's not many it's not two and so what the buddhists do and i think i think they're right

01:21:34.100 to do this but again it's it's hard to explain they give this category that this concept of experience

01:21:40.020 which is usually referred to in in negation right it's it's an emptiness is a term of of negation

01:21:47.220 or selflessness or you know it's unconditioned or it's you know unconstructed or it's in the tibetan

01:21:54.760 tradition they they do allow for some kind of positive conceptions and they talk about non-dual

01:21:59.660 awareness or they talk about you know or um you know the zogchen teachings of a zogchen means great

01:22:04.820 perfection or great completion right so it's there's some seeming kind of affirmation of what

01:22:11.220 this thing is but i mean the buddhists are very leery of reifying anything right and that's

01:22:17.320 appropriate because what you're there are many ways to sort of kind of grasp at peak experience right and

01:22:24.400 and all of that grasping all of that trying to to hold on to to some kind of high is a deviation point

01:22:32.480 it is a way of just on some level you know selfing again you know whatever grandiose a way one can be

01:22:39.320 doing that and this is one this now to take us even further afield this is one way in which

01:22:43.720 the psychedelic experience which many of us have have found so useful to this project of learning how

01:22:49.660 to meditate or you know building a contemplative life it's one way in which it can be profoundly

01:22:55.000 misleading for people because psychedelic experiences almost by definition are characterized by

01:23:00.800 very different expansive experiences right like what you've done when you're having a psychedelic

01:23:07.340 experience is because you've taken this drug that has a predictable effect and you've done it for this

01:23:11.780 reason you have produced a wholesale change in the contents of consciousness right and this can give

01:23:19.100 you in some cases a clear insight into what you know into emptiness into selflessness into the

01:23:25.160 non-duality of consciousness but because you got that insight by just changing everything it's very

01:23:32.400 easy to get the sense that okay freedom is a matter of changing everything it's a matter of having very

01:23:38.120 different sights and sounds and sensations and you know it's got to be you know freedom is you know

01:23:43.160 to be a buddha or to be enlightened or to be on the really on the path to any of those things

01:23:47.840 it has to be a matter of just this very expansive change in the in the energy of experience right so

01:23:56.680 and it could be feeling you know much much more love or much much more compassion or bliss or rapture or

01:24:03.640 just you know a kind of a pyrotechnic change in the visual field like if you're you know if you're

01:24:09.420 actually thinking of proper psychedelics like lsd or psilocybin well then everything just looks

01:24:14.480 different like everything is just so much more beautiful right and like the trees are you know

01:24:18.680 breathing and you know it's just like the light this kind of prismatic you know incandescent change

01:24:24.480 to everything like it just light is all of a sudden so much you know more of a thing right and the energy

01:24:30.400 of the world is so much like you put your hand on on a tree and like the end it's just the like you

01:24:34.900 can feel that you know your your energy body merge with the energy body of the tree or it certainly can

01:24:40.160 seem like that's happening right and so like you could do that for an hour and a half and

01:24:43.900 and and that's the most interesting thing in the world so you have to have that kind of mind

01:24:48.360 in order to get closer to this thing right but all of that those are all just changes in the

01:24:55.160 contents of consciousness and the thing that meditation is really pointing to is it's not

01:25:00.620 that it's has no relationship to any of that and and you do tend to have those kinds of experiences

01:25:05.340 more and more when you're the more stable you get in the practice of meditation but the thing to be

01:25:10.700 recognized the centralistness the emptiness the selflessness the illusoriness of the ego all you

01:25:16.080 know all of that stuff that's here right now in the midst of a totally ordinary experience right

01:25:23.120 like nothing has to change about experience to recognize that and so and that's where these further

01:25:30.180 ramifications of non-duality come out which is to say that like let's say you're experiencing

01:25:35.820 you know impatience or anger or fear or something like classically negative mental state and then you

01:25:43.120 suddenly become mindful of non-duality you can do that and recognize it and it's fully recognized i

01:25:51.140 mean the centralistness of experience the illusoriness of the self the freedom of all of that is fully

01:25:57.200 present in the first instant even before anything has changed about your experience like if you're angry

01:26:03.580 or impatient or annoyed or whatever the thing is anxious fearful sad the energy of all of that of

01:26:09.660 that mental state can be still fully present and that when the center drops out that the freedom of

01:26:15.920 selflessness the freedom of emptiness is fully available even before anything has changed at the level of

01:26:23.180 experience right so your freedom is not contingent upon the subsequent changes that will in fact happen

01:26:29.580 because you know then you've become mindful you're no longer thinking about why you're you know should

01:26:33.840 be angry whatever it is so i'm not saying that there isn't implications for the character of your

01:26:39.260 experience in subsequent moments but the real non-duality of this is that on some level anger isn't even

01:26:45.500 anger like wreck anger recognized is also just non-dual wisdom and so it is with any other negative

01:26:52.700 emotion like it equalizes everything in the end because there's just consciousness and its contents

01:26:59.940 and there's no center to that let me just jump in on that for a second let's take a moment of anger

01:27:04.820 or a moment of spaghetti sauce on the on the shirt or whatever it is so that might be setting the bar too

01:27:10.900 high but dualistic mindfulness so the way most of us experience mindfulness which is oh okay i can see

01:27:21.320 this has happened i can notice that i'm angry right maybe i can summon some investigative powers like

01:27:28.320 oh i can see that anger isn't a monolithic thing it's a compound it consists of buzzing in my chest

01:27:34.860 self-righteous thoughts ears turning red whatever and in that putting of anger through a cheese grater

01:27:42.560 we are less we're less owned by it what's the difference between that dualistic mindfulness i am doing

01:27:50.980 all of that right and a non-dual mindfulness where we're having the same anger what is the increase

01:27:58.420 in freedom if we're going from dualistic mindfulness to non-dualistic mindfulness well i mean the first

01:28:04.980 thing to say is that even the dualistic mindfulness is is a very important stage and a an amazing thing

01:28:11.480 to have accomplished and it's all too rare in this world i mean most people out there don't have this

01:28:19.900 practice and would benefit from it right so it's like it's you're in a very rarefied position just

01:28:25.440 to be practicing and to know the difference between being lost in thought and identified with thought and

01:28:29.740 not right and that's just to be able to get off the ride for a few moments is an enormous change in

01:28:35.800 one's capacity to be happy and to not suffer unnecessarily which is so much of what is the real

01:28:42.820 antithesis to being happy in our lives and we just you're continually waking up to the fact that

01:28:47.380 you're suffering in a way that just it's just simply not needed right it's like it's not adding

01:28:53.920 anything it's not giving you a capacity to do anything different it's just it's just extra pain

01:28:59.660 but the difference is with dualistic mindfulness i mean certainly in the beginning and i mean even

01:29:06.900 for the longest time even what we call dualistic mindfulness much of it isn't even mindfulness

01:29:12.760 on some level it's a stratagem to change your experience and so to make that concrete you feel

01:29:20.780 anxious and you don't like feeling anxious and one of the reasons why you've learned to meditate is the

01:29:28.140 promise that you'll feel less anxious if you actually get good enough at this practice and you

01:29:32.960 can use it as an antidote to anxiety right so so that's part of the reason why you're playing this game

01:29:38.640 to begin with is you don't like anxiety and you want you want less of it right so that contains

01:29:43.380 within it the germ of you know aversion that is going to ride along with you for the longest time

01:29:50.920 which is itself a corruption of the whole project of becoming mindful because my mindfulness is you

01:29:56.240 know dualistic mindfulness is you know by definition i mean just from the you know the buddhist

01:30:00.540 abhidama side of it is not compatible with aversion it is a state of non-aversion i mean you really need to

01:30:07.560 be just accepting of experience in order to successfully be mindfully you know paying attention

01:30:13.520 to it so the game and it's it really is this continually fascinating game of is is what was

01:30:19.940 one of noticing kind of counterfeits to mindfulness you know continually catching yourself paying attention

01:30:27.640 to experience in order to change it however covertly like you think you're just being open and accepting

01:30:34.540 and mindful but what you're really doing is subtly pushing away your experience you're trying to be

01:30:41.940 less anxious you're waiting for the anxiety to disappear right you're waiting or the anger whatever

01:30:46.980 it is so that covert agenda is in fact corrupting to the practice it is itself a very standard way of

01:30:55.780 just practicing aversion you know or greed or whatever depending on the context you're you know you're

01:31:01.760 or ignorance i mean you're all you're all three i mean you're practicing you know the core kind of faults

01:31:07.320 that mindfulness is the the remedy for and you're not noticing that and you're calling it mindfulness

01:31:13.880 that's the predicament that many of us are in a lot of the time as meditators you know we're trying

01:31:19.360 to pay attention we are paying attention you know i'll be damned if i'm not paying attention

01:31:23.660 but there's competing thoughts and you're not noticing them and then although then you notice a thought

01:31:30.260 you let go of it oh fuck i was supposed to be paying attention now you're back to the breath

01:31:33.340 and there's a pain in the knee and uh you know i'm a little anxious about this thing i have to do later

01:31:38.540 and it's this meditation is like yesterday the meditation felt really good and this wasn't even i'm

01:31:43.900 not i'm not even getting a good meditation at i'm it's been 20 minutes i've got 15 more minutes and

01:31:50.040 you know i haven't really sunk into the meditation okay now i'm really going to try

01:31:53.320 and what happens to almost any meditator is there are certain states of experience that you associate

01:31:59.860 with good meditation successful meditation you know feelings of calm and tranquility and rapture

01:32:05.760 and bliss like if you've gone on retreat and gotten any level of concentration you've probably touched

01:32:11.420 really kind of drug-like experiences with meditation it really feels good to be concentrated and

01:32:18.060 and the moment the first time that happens to you on a retreat or you know sometimes it'll happen

01:32:23.040 before retreat if one has any capacity for concentration you know that the pleasure of

01:32:28.260 a concentrated mind is just a pure drug experience it's just like i mean i've never taken heroin but

01:32:33.100 i can imagine it's probably you know heroin's probably a lot like that i mean i've had you know

01:32:37.560 propofol or whatever so yeah it's like it has this anesthetic drug-like blissful the body's

01:32:44.460 disappearing well the body's gone you know there's just awareness i mean that's just it's fantastic

01:32:50.840 right but it's temporary causes and conditions bring it about and when causes and conditions

01:32:57.620 change it disappears i mean certain the bell rings it's time for tea you know they don't have the

01:33:02.160 tea you wanted where the fuck how did they run out of tea this i'm paying good money to be at the on

01:33:06.580 this retreat and they don't have to they don't have any black tea that's you in that next moment and

01:33:11.040 you know five minutes ago you were you know johnny bliss who didn't have a body right um there's

01:33:16.900 something deeper and or and paradoxically even just more on the surface to recognize which is

01:33:23.740 consciousness already doesn't have a center right there's no you in the middle of it doing any of

01:33:31.920 these things noticing any of these things and so to come back to why dualistic mindfulness is different

01:33:37.040 from non-dual mindfulness dualistic mindfulness always allows for this corruption of having this

01:33:44.160 agenda to improve experience right like i i didn't really notice it at the time but i was paying

01:33:49.480 attention so that i would feel less anxious and of course i wanted to feel less anxious i mean why

01:33:53.660 don't why am i doing like why am i doing this in the first it's like there's a sort of gordian knot

01:33:58.360 there that can't be untied but it just has to be cut right like you're going to have an agenda

01:34:04.320 at least from time to time and in many moments that you can't recognize unless you can actually just

01:34:11.900 arrive at the destination right in this next moment unless your mindfulness begins to feel

01:34:19.280 like freedom like actual freedom it's always going to seem like this remedial antidote to

01:34:29.280 a problem that really exists right like the anxiety is really here it's really a problem even though i'm

01:34:36.340 no i know it's not supposed to be a problem because it's just something i can be mindful of i'm being

01:34:41.060 mindful of it but still sort of waiting for it to disappear right and maybe it's just disappearing a

01:34:48.280 little bit now and that's progress that's better and i'm sort of liking that direction this is going

01:34:53.700 and so that's a little greed and like all that whole that machinery it's very hard to it's not

01:34:59.500 impossible i mean you can get to a place of dualistic equanimity there's no question but being able to

01:35:05.880 practice in a non-dual way allows you just to cut through that with each moment of mindfulness which

01:35:11.920 is in this moment even the energy of anxiety has no center right it's like there's no there's no me

01:35:20.640 over here with the problem anymore right like like it's just it's like free fall like for a moment there

01:35:29.000 there's just no gravity like you're you're now falling at a thousand miles an hour through

01:35:33.180 the anxiety right there's no there was structure there was like it was really me pressed against

01:35:38.800 the wall here for a moment dualistically trying to be a quantumist with all of this but the non-dual

01:35:44.020 practice just you realize there's no wall there's nothing at your back like you just turn around and

01:35:48.980 it's just open right and nothing needs to have changed and so i mean from my point of view it's only in

01:35:54.120 non-dual practice that you can honestly say a moment of mindfulness is a moment of freedom whatever

01:36:01.660 the character of the experience it's no longer a practice you're not actually meditating on anything

01:36:07.000 you're just recognizing the way consciousness is so you know in waking up i i'm and it's not just me

01:36:13.760 it's you know other teachers in there as well most of us are teaching dualistic mindfulness all the

01:36:19.740 while encouraging a non-dual view of it along the way and trying to provoke that insight into non-duality

01:36:26.460 at the soonest opportunity and trying to keep you know one foot on either side of this thing which is

01:36:32.240 that to keep conserving that iterative incremental linear non-paradoxical message of like just keep

01:36:40.500 paying attention to the breath just come back to the breath come back to sounds and notice the

01:36:44.440 impermanence i mean impermanence is easy there's nothing paradoxical about impermanence right

01:36:48.780 everything that arises passes away every thought every emotion every sensation there's a radical

01:36:54.220 freedom in just noticing that right i mean just noticing that every time you've ever been angry

01:36:58.840 before it's always disappeared right like just like nothing is permanent and to notice that on a more

01:37:04.980 microscopic level as you said you know even even in the presence of anger in this moment you notice

01:37:11.700 that it's not even just one thing it's a composite of things and that all these things are changing

01:37:15.760 all the sensations are changing it's a cloud of sensation you keep all of that going but i'm still

01:37:21.340 trying to remind people that on this other side there's this paradoxical message and opportunity

01:37:27.700 which is you can wake up from the dream that any of this is a project any of this is a problem that

01:37:33.520 has to be solved i uh you know spent many years building a competitor app and in that time notwithstanding

01:37:40.560 our friendship never really dove too deeply into waking up but have now that i don't have that

01:37:46.720 happening more have now spent a lot of time on waking up and i think you you execute what you just

01:37:52.100 described very well you and the other teachers of yeah you're you're getting a lot of what most of us

01:37:57.680 would recognize as like a kind of garden variety mindfulness with a consistent gentle push toward oh yeah

01:38:04.920 actually just see if you can notice what it's like when you look for what's noticing everything

01:38:11.300 and my my sense in my practice and you tell me if you disagree with this my sense is you want to knock

01:38:18.780 on this door consistently but without a lot of sweatiness it's like it takes for some of us it can

01:38:26.700 take a minute to see this thing you're pointing to and it can be maddening because what you're describing

01:38:32.240 sounds great and then i look for the looker and i don't even know what the fuck you're talking about

01:38:36.720 but my experience with this which dates back to 10 15 years ago when you recommended i read on having

01:38:44.080 no head and i brought it with me on a retreat when you're not supposed to read but i was reading it

01:38:47.900 anyway and i just started gently once in a while looking for my head in the midst of my regular

01:38:53.680 meditation practice and every once in a while it's much more on the surface and readily available than you

01:38:59.400 would think it's not some it's not something that comes after excavation it's just kind of like

01:39:03.980 looking in the right way with the right attitude you just see this head is a concept right now all

01:39:10.480 that's left is the world and again i know that's frustrating for some people to hear but my recommendation

01:39:15.280 which i'm floating to you to see if you agree is just play with it play with it consistently over time

01:39:22.520 don't get too worked up about it and eventually you might see something interesting yeah and also

01:39:28.760 walk-in meditation with eyes open is a very good way to do it huge and we were talking about this

01:39:35.260 before we started rolling for me i do a lot of walking meditation as an insomniac it's my way to

01:39:40.440 get myself ready for bed and if i can't sleep in the middle of the night i'll get back up and do it again

01:39:45.120 just asking myself as i'm walking what is knowing all of this and who's even asking this fucking

01:39:51.500 question yeah yeah gets me right into this sense of oh yeah this is there's this yawning chasm of

01:39:58.040 knowing here and i i can't i i uh i can't claim it as my own in fact the thoughts of being a self

01:40:06.280 are appearing within that within that space yeah but for something there's something about having

01:40:11.820 eyes open that makes that easier and i know you emphasize that on the app yeah so i mean this can be

01:40:17.440 confusing for people because they associate meditation with as a with eyes closed i mean

01:40:22.780 because it just seems like it's more restful many people have a preference for closing their eyes

01:40:27.840 and it's just often taught that way that you know you're going to focus on the breath or sounds all

01:40:32.600 that gets heightened when you close your eyes but there's a reason why i think there's a reason why

01:40:36.560 that the zogchen teachings emphasize eyes open practice when they're targeting this non-dual insight

01:40:43.120 and it's because so much of our sense of self versus other and it's in social space you know

01:40:49.620 you the sense that you're in relationship to another person or just you're differentiating yourself from

01:40:54.520 the physical environment so much of that is a is a visually referenced impression right and it's just

01:41:01.240 i mean the effect of vision is so strong that you can actually get in you know very um artificial

01:41:07.720 you know laboratory conditions you can get it what's called a body swapping illusion like if we put a

01:41:12.700 headset on on your head and one on my head where my eyes get the input from your goggles and your eyes

01:41:21.380 get the input from my goggles and then we stand looking at each other we can get the impression of

01:41:26.560 being in the other's body like they can be just like a our sense of being in the world is just so

01:41:32.320 overwhelmingly a visual sense you know most of the time so that when you recognize non-duality with

01:41:39.500 eyes open it can be that much more vivid i mean it's just

01:41:42.700 the shift from duality to non-duality can be much more salient with eyes open whereas with eyes

01:41:47.940 closed i mean you can do it with eyes closed and once you've learned how to do it with eyes open

01:41:52.520 it becomes easier to do with eyes closed but there's something much more subtle about it because

01:41:57.540 when you close your eyes you're just kind of in there's just a sense of just being inside you know

01:42:02.160 kind of interior and the sense of subject object dualism is less pronounced but when you're when

01:42:08.480 you're looking at the world of objects with eyes open it's like if there's a glass over here i'm

01:42:12.380 reaching for it i'm picking it up it's obvious that this is a dualistic occasion and so when i when

01:42:17.260 you drop the dualism it's just a very clear shift and so yeah again douglas harding noticed that and he

01:42:25.000 used this on having no head you know paradigm but with walking meditation you can do a nice thing because

01:42:30.640 you're moving through space you can notice that the default sense of subjectivity is that you

01:42:38.340 you're over here you're in your head moving through the world of objects and so as you walk

01:42:46.740 you know you are moving toward static objects and if you're walking toward a tree you are the this

01:42:53.380 locus of consciousness that is moving toward the tree but you can also flip that and just feel like

01:42:59.780 you're not moving on some level and even while you're walking and everything's just moving

01:43:03.860 toward you right like you're just this this still point and everything's coming toward you

01:43:08.280 and you can toggle between those two impressions right that you're moving through space or that

01:43:13.520 everything is moving toward you and you can do this even more easily on some level and if you're

01:43:18.100 like a passenger in a car right like you're looking out the windshield you can get the sense that

01:43:22.300 you're hurtling through space and there's the world is rushing by or you're still and just the world is

01:43:27.280 rushing toward you you can toggle between those two those sensations and they're kind of equivalent

01:43:31.820 but they're different i mean like it's almost like a necker cube you know where one side pops out and

01:43:37.360 the other side it reverses and it's that that bi-stable percept but in toggling between those two

01:43:43.840 senses of you moving through space and it's just space rushing toward you you're actually kind of

01:43:50.100 passing through the fulcrum of this non-dual inside of having no head like you're like that

01:43:56.540 the thing you're doing to toggle between those two is kind of very quickly passing over the still point

01:44:04.280 which it when you recognize it on some level there isn't like motion is a concept like there's

01:44:10.840 everything is just in its for that moment everything is just in its own place right like there's just the

01:44:16.200 world it's not you moving through it and it's there's not there's no place from which you're

01:44:21.400 the thing that's moving toward the static objects and when you reverse it there's no place toward

01:44:26.420 which things the you know the movie of the world can be rushing or you know it's like there's no

01:44:31.460 there's nothing to reverse right there's just the the point you're passing through is just

01:44:35.700 everything is in its own place and there's kind of an inscrutable just openness and suchness and

01:44:44.120 there's again there's just there's no two sides there's no you're not over here with everything

01:44:48.680 else out there there's just everything you know it's just the world on some level and so but walking

01:44:55.020 meditation or you know eyes open moving you know i i hesitate to say do it while driving because when

01:45:01.600 you're actually at the wheel you have to have other things to pay attention to but as a passenger or as

01:45:06.420 a seasoned driver um or as you know you can play with this with open eyes and it yeah it's a useful

01:45:14.360 way of getting this insight before i let you go my two habitual final questions one is is there

01:45:21.680 something you were hoping to talk about that we didn't i don't think so i think we covered a lot of

01:45:25.960 many sides of this yeah finally can you just walk us through you know just say more about waking up

01:45:32.920 and you know what went into creating it and why you recommend it well i i feel like a an incredibly

01:45:40.000 fortunate beneficiary of this change in technology so i wrote that wrote a book called waking up which

01:45:47.400 came out in um 2014 which really has the same kind of content in it i mean it was my best effort to

01:45:55.000 present these ideas in book form but audio is just so much better as a vehicle for teaching you know the

01:46:01.840 practice and you know the couple of the concepts and actually and more importantly guiding people

01:46:06.900 in a moment-to-moment meditation practice right so it's just in my view it's the perfect technology

01:46:12.960 to do it and i and i don't think video adds anything important to it i mean a video is obviously useful

01:46:20.840 for its own reasons but in terms of actual meditation instruction i just think audio is king i mean it's

01:46:27.360 it's much more intimate it's it's something you can you you don't have to be looking at anything in

01:46:32.460 order to receive it i mean so you can you can be listening as you walk or you can be listening as

01:46:35.740 you with eyes closed or it's just the perfect technology for it so we kind of stumbled upon

01:46:41.220 the opportunity to build an app right i mean this was just not a thing before uh i'm not sure which

01:46:47.220 which year i mean we had you know the smartphone came out and because the iphone came out in 2007

01:46:52.120 yeah seven but you know the app ecosystem gradually got built out there but it just after i wrote the

01:46:58.360 book i saw an opportunity to create this audio version of it which is just in my view so much

01:47:04.660 better than than a book ever could be and so there's the introductory course which is my best

01:47:11.040 effort to lead someone from you know the very first experience of meditation through everything we've

01:47:16.480 been talking about and then there's what's called the daily meditation which is just me kind of

01:47:22.320 continuing with in that vein but then there's just many other teachers and practices now in the app and

01:47:29.380 and different categories of content so there's there's the the practice category which is has me and many

01:47:36.000 other teachers teaching you know guided meditations and then there there's the theory category which is

01:47:41.520 much more of a discussion about along the lines we've been having here just how how can we

01:47:46.100 understand the practice in the context of there's various concepts we have about you know psychology

01:47:52.480 or philosophy or a scientific understanding of you know what it is to be a person in a world or

01:47:58.000 politics or anything else and then there's a life track now which we're we're in many other topics even

01:48:05.120 beyond meditation and you know enlightenment or any of the other things we've been talking about

01:48:09.440 are now available to talk about i mean so you know you got someone like oliver berkman teaching you

01:48:13.960 know time management or the the illusion of time management or you know in his own inimitable way

01:48:19.040 and so yeah the the app is in the process of is well in the process of outgrowing any of my

01:48:26.300 contributions to it there's just a lot in there cognitive behavioral therapy and stoicism and just

01:48:31.960 many things that are not mindfulness practice per se or you know meditation per se and now of course with

01:48:38.820 me you and joseph goldstein yeah yeah so we have this uh three of us did this mini retreat or i i

01:48:45.960 had this brilliant idea that you and joseph should do a mini retreat and and have conversations to

01:48:51.660 extract his his wisdom and uh then i realized well why why would i miss this retreat so the three of us

01:48:58.480 had a mini retreat in maine and uh we'll be if we haven't released them yet uh when you release this

01:49:04.060 that audio will soon be on the app by the time this is released the eightfold path course that we

01:49:10.200 recorded with joseph will be on the app and the first of the four parts will have played on this

01:49:15.720 podcast feed nice nice yes yeah well i'm just listening to that now and uh that was a lot of fun

01:49:21.640 we had a lot of laughs yes yeah yeah more more fun than uh one would think talking about buddhism

01:49:28.100 yeah yeah so that's uh i think we're doing the final edit now but i mean there's very little

01:49:34.920 being cut out so i think that's eight hours of conversation with you me and joseph it was a good

01:49:40.620 time yeah um as was this thank you for making time yeah great to see you yeah lots of fun

01:49:46.180 fun

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - April 14, 2025

#408 — Finding Equanimity in Chaos

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