Making Sense - Sam Harris - September 17, 2026


#493 — Two Reasons to Meditate

#492 — The Second Plane, 25 Years Later

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

141.92

Word count

1,870

Sentence count

92

People

Also mentioned:
Steve Jobs Picasso

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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.