Making Sense - Sam Harris - September 17, 2026


#493 — Two Reasons to Meditate

Hosted by
Sam Harris
Mentioned
Steve Jobs Picasso
#492 — The Second Plane, 25 Years Later #494 — A Coin Toss for the Future

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

141.92

Word count

1,870

Sentence count

97


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 there are many reasons to meditate but they tend to fall into two basic categories the first is
00:00:26.960 psychological and ethical. One wants to live a better life. One wants to suffer less. This is
00:00:33.960 the reason it's emphasized in Buddhism, and it's what motivates most contemplative traditions.
00:00:39.820 In Buddhism, meditation is part of what's called the Eightfold Path that includes right understanding,
00:00:45.380 right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness,
00:00:51.180 and right concentration. And the last three, effort, mindfulness, and concentration,
00:00:57.960 encapsulate the practice of meditation. The other aspects of the Buddhist path relate to
00:01:02.820 one's worldview and one's ethics and one's behavior altogether. The point is that meditation
00:01:09.120 isn't traditionally recommended as a mere tool of stress reduction. It's part of a larger effort to
00:01:15.740 live a better life. The goal really is to become more sane and ethical, and to experience less
00:01:21.660 psychological suffering, less anxiety and regret and anger and despair, and to experience deeper
00:01:27.980 states of well-being, love and compassion in particular, and have better relationships on
00:01:33.880 that basis, to find a better way of being in the world altogether. Many people seem to have no
00:01:39.680 idea that such a project exists, but some understand that it must exist. It must be
00:01:46.480 possible to live a much better life than we have tended to until this moment. Such people begin to
00:01:52.160 suspect that merely achieving things out in the world, or even in their personal lives, gratifying
00:01:58.020 their desires, meeting their goals, becoming more successful, having a family, and conforming to the
00:02:03.940 norms of whatever culture they happen to have been born into, isn't necessarily the path that
00:02:08.980 leads to the deepest happiness. To see the problem with an ordinary search for happiness,
00:02:14.760 one need only reflect on how common it is for some of the most successful people in any society
00:02:19.100 to nevertheless be spectacularly miserable. I'm not talking about the occasional lottery winner
00:02:24.960 or some random billionaire who made their money in some terribly boring way. Think of all the
00:02:30.400 extremely creative people who produce amazing work and earn all the recognition a person could hope
00:02:37.360 for. The artists, musicians, actors, entrepreneurs, and others that succeed at the highest level
00:02:43.440 and get invited to all the parties. Think of people like Picasso or Prince or Steve Jobs.
00:02:51.700 People who got a chance to do exactly what they wanted in life and what they were best at. They
00:02:56.820 were fully recognized for their talents and got rich on that basis and were surrounded by other
00:03:02.620 famous and successful people who admired them, but they were still unhappy, obviously unhappy.
00:03:10.380 On one level, these people were geniuses, but they were also deeply uninspiring people.
00:03:16.900 Being great at something and being recognized for your talents, again, not for something trivial,
00:03:22.380 but for something amazing, isn't the same as living a good life. Think of all the creative
00:03:28.400 and successful people who have killed themselves because they didn't want to live another hour.
00:03:33.740 Finding a way of being in the world that is genuinely good and communicating that goodness
00:03:38.860 to others requires something beyond intelligence and talent and success. It requires wisdom and
00:03:46.140 love. It requires a capacity to step outside oneself. This isn't at all in conflict with
00:03:52.600 professional or material success, but it obviously doesn't come along with them either.
00:03:58.080 And it is well understood that striving toward various goals in life, on the assumption that
00:04:03.540 the fulfillment of any one of them will be the thing that makes you happy, can be the path to
00:04:08.880 a deeper failure. A failure to truly put your house in order, psychologically and ethically.
00:04:15.480 So this first set of reasons for practicing meditation is psychological and ethical.
00:04:21.520 One wants to live a better life.
00:04:23.600 One wants to be sane, really sane, whatever that means, ultimately.
00:04:28.720 And one approaches meditation and the surrounding philosophy
00:04:31.620 as a method for changing one's moment-to-moment experience of life.
00:04:36.580 The second set of reasons to practice meditation is intellectual
00:04:41.200 and motivated more by curiosity than by dissatisfaction.
00:04:46.860 One simply wants to understand what is true in each moment.
00:04:50.660 what is true about the nature of oneself, the nature of the mind, and how one's brief existence
00:04:55.740 in this world fits into the wider context of reality at large. And in meditation, one takes
00:05:01.960 a scientific attitude toward exploring the evidence of first-person experience directly.
00:05:07.180 Just what is going on here, really? What is possible to discover about the mind directly?
00:05:13.820 What is this mysterious reality of consciousness from its own side? Whatever its relationship to
00:05:19.120 the brain, what is consciousness in itself? Is there something profound to discover about the
00:05:25.560 nature of experience once one has developed the ability to pay attention to it? When I talk about
00:05:32.080 meditation and the nature of the mind, I tend to move freely between these two types of motivation
00:05:37.060 because they both animate my practice and they're actually connected. Understanding certain facts
00:05:43.660 about the mind can lead directly to the mitigation of suffering. Deepening one's understanding of
00:05:49.340 certain concepts can help one recognize a type of freedom that is beyond concepts. So while I
00:05:55.360 might seem to emphasize the mitigation of suffering in some moments and the discovery of what is true
00:06:00.780 in others, please understand that these two motivations are really two aspects of a single
00:06:05.380 project. To wake up from the often unpleasant dream of separateness and confinement to self
00:06:11.520 and to recognize a wider reality of mind
00:06:15.280 prior to the identification with thought.
00:06:19.880 And identification with thought really is the heart of the problem.
00:06:24.120 Thinking isn't the enemy,
00:06:25.660 but thinking without knowing that you're thinking is.
00:06:29.620 And this is how we spend most of our time.
00:06:32.040 There are many symptoms of this condition,
00:06:34.020 but two stand out very clearly.
00:06:36.880 In addition to creating an immense amount of psychological suffering and conflict,
00:06:40.500 is tempting to say all of our psychological suffering and conflict. Our identification
00:06:45.020 with thought is what produces the feeling that each of us has of being a separate self,
00:06:51.700 an ego, an inner subject endowed with freedom of will. Throughout waking up, I discuss what I
00:06:58.820 consider to be one of the most important truths about the mind that we can discover directly
00:07:03.320 through meditation, a truth that I often summarize by saying that the self is an illusion. In other
00:07:09.320 context, I might say that free will is an illusion. And while it is a different emphasis, the same
00:07:15.120 point is being made. As it happens, both claims inspire a fair amount of confusion and even
00:07:20.820 alarm. So I want to talk about what exactly is being claimed and why it matters. And my emphasis
00:07:27.440 here that the purpose of mindfulness is to undermine some primary illusions that define
00:07:32.520 our subjectivity in each moment. This is what differentiates much of the instruction in waking
00:07:37.340 up from what you'll find in many other meditation apps. I believe that cutting through the illusion
00:07:42.980 of the self and experiencing consciousness prior to the identification with thought
00:07:47.660 in every moment of mindfulness is the ultimate form of meditation. It reveals a basic freedom
00:07:54.740 that is inherent in the present moment and that you would otherwise seek in the future.
00:08:00.740 And seeking in this way, you may spend the rest of your life struggling to find it. And it really
00:08:05.740 is true to say that practicing in this way allows us to arrive at our destination with each step
00:08:12.400 because it is simply obvious in this moment that consciousness is already free without impediment,
00:08:19.740 without form, without confinement, and without any problem to solve. This insight isn't mere
00:08:27.800 stress reduction or relaxation or self-improvement. It's a direct recognition of the nature of
00:08:34.920 experience itself, any experience. And focusing on this deeper truth directly is what distinguishes
00:08:42.420 what I'm attempting to do in waking up from most other efforts to popularize mindfulness.
00:08:47.980 Meditation isn't principally about stress reduction or becoming more productive,
00:08:53.760 though it can be good for things like that. It isn't about creating temporary states of calm,
00:08:59.520 though it's good for that too. It's about having a radical insight into the nature of your own
00:09:05.060 subjectivity that transforms your experience of everything and in a way that erases the boundary
00:09:11.520 between formal meditation and the rest of your life. Spiritual practice has often been likened
00:09:18.280 to a war. There's the opposing army of your thoughts and tendencies and habits and preoccupations
00:09:24.460 armed with negative emotions, fear and anger and self-doubt and envy and sadness.
00:09:31.900 There's this perpetual siege, psychologically speaking.
00:09:36.260 And of course, the outer circumstances of your life require continuous upkeep and improvement.
00:09:40.940 So inwardly, many of us are often seething with reactivity and self-concern,
00:09:45.600 and outwardly, we're just very, very busy.
00:09:49.000 Now, it's true that one can work to pacify all this chaos
00:09:52.300 and try to win the war against this opposing army.
00:09:56.600 It's not that nothing can be accomplished in this way,
00:09:59.940 but there is no final victory.
00:10:03.240 The truth is you will never successfully pacify your mind.
00:10:07.420 You will never stop your thoughts and emotions from arising
00:10:10.760 or ensure that they're always positive.
00:10:13.720 You will always be vulnerable to the next thing that appears,
00:10:17.880 and you will suffer major losses and disappointments
00:10:21.020 and injuries and unpleasant surprises in life.
00:10:24.660 Only freedom from the illusion of the self
00:10:27.580 offers a durable remedy for this.
00:10:31.360 It is true that you can be mindful dualistically
00:10:34.020 with your sense of self intact
00:10:35.940 and successfully dampen your negative reactions
00:10:39.180 and regulate your behavior and improve your ethics
00:10:42.020 and generally straighten yourself out.
00:10:44.500 And all of that is worth doing.
00:10:46.420 And in the beginning of one's practice,
00:10:47.760 there's no alternative but to practice in this way.
00:10:51.020 and yet the war continues, and you will find yourself outnumbered by your enemies most of the
00:10:56.520 time. The insight into selflessness, into non-duality, cutting through the illusion that
00:11:03.240 there's a thinking subject in your head in the first place who can now decide to be mindful,
00:11:09.120 this is analogous to capturing the general of the opposing army, because it accomplishes
00:11:15.200 everything all at once. The battlefield is unchanged, but the war is suddenly over,
00:11:22.380 if only for a few moments at a time. Once you can truly break your identification with thought
00:11:28.140 and mindfulness becomes non-dualistic, that is, free of the feeling that there is one who is
00:11:34.260 being mindful, you recognize that there's nothing more to do. You can feel that there's nothing more
00:11:40.620 to do and no one to do it. And then you can leave everything just as it is. And here the intrinsic
00:11:47.220 freedom of mind becomes obvious. And meditation at that point is just a matter of getting used
00:11:52.760 to what is obvious. And that is the type of practice I'm trying to introduce you to in
00:11:57.700 waking up. And all of the surrounding theory and conversations and analysis is designed to support
00:12:03.800 that insight. Again, this comes back to the two reasons to practice, which are not truly separate.
00:12:10.620 It simply is the case that understanding certain truths about the mind can lead to a form of psychological freedom that most people simply don't know is here.
00:12:40.620 Thank you.