Making Sense of Death ｜ Episode 9 of The Essential Sam Harris
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Summary
The goal of this series is to organize, compile, and juxtapose conversations hosted by Sam Harris into specific areas of interest. This is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam s perspectives and arguments, the various explorations and approaches to the topic, the relevant agreements and disagreements, and the pushback and evolving thoughts which his guests have advanced. The purpose of these compilations is not to provide a complete picture of any issue, but to entice you to go deeper into these subjects. Along the way, we ll point you to the full episodes with each featured guest, and at the conclusion, we'll offer some reading, listening, and watching suggestions which range from fun and light to densely academic. As this series nears its conclusion with the final two episodes, it s a good time to remind ourselves of its overall purpose: to make sense of death. Sam has long argued for a unity of knowledge where the barriers between fields of study are viewed as largely unhelpful artifacts of unnecessarily partitioned thought. The pursuit of wisdom and reason in one area of study naturally bleeds into, and greatly affects, others. In this topic, you ll hear the natural overlap with theories of belief and unbelief, consciousness, and free will. So, get ready to make Sense of Death: a compilation that makes sense of the ever-present seat at the table of our experience, and that is actually in direct service of bringing us back to life, ourselves, ourselves and each other. You ll hear plenty of crossover into other topics as these dives into the archives unfold, and your thinking about a particular topic, as these thoughts may shift as you realize its contingent relationships with others, and you ll veer into other situations, and their contingent relationships And you ll be drawn into the overarching theme of Evergreen. Sam Harris . The Essential Sam Harris This is Making Sense of death: a 10-part series exploring the concept of Death, Life, Consciousness, and Dying, and Life, and Death, and its relationship to the human condition by the Evergreen by The Evergreen Project. by is a collection of three themes braided together throughout this compilation. This is the final installment in a ten-part mini-series that will be released over the next five episodes. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore it s made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. By becoming a supporter of what we re doing here, you re making possible by becoming one.
Transcript
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Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber
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00:00:18.420
In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at
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There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with
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We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support
00:00:35.900
So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
00:00:55.520
The goal of this series is to organize, compile, and juxtapose conversations hosted by Sam
00:01:06.280
This is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam's perspectives and arguments,
00:01:11.800
the various explorations and approaches to the topic, the relevant agreements and disagreements,
00:01:18.040
and the pushbacks and evolving thoughts which his guests have advanced.
00:01:21.600
The purpose of these compilations is not to provide a complete picture of any issue, but
00:01:28.700
to entice you to go deeper into these subjects.
00:01:31.920
Along the way, we'll point you to the full episodes with each featured guest.
00:01:36.600
And at the conclusion, we'll offer some reading, listening, and watching suggestions, which range
00:01:49.220
Sam has long argued for a unity of knowledge where the barriers between fields of study
00:01:53.600
are viewed as largely unhelpful artifacts of unnecessarily partitioned thought.
00:01:59.060
The pursuit of wisdom and reason in one area of study naturally bleeds into, and greatly affects,
00:02:05.600
You'll hear plenty of crossover into other topics as these dives into the archives unfold.
00:02:12.060
And your thinking about a particular topic may shift as you realize its contingent relationships
00:02:18.340
In this topic, you'll hear the natural overlap with theories of belief and unbelief, consciousness,
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Let's start with an image, inspired by one of the guests you'll hear in this compilation.
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Picture a large hourglass that sits in your living room, perhaps on your bookshelf or mantle.
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Somewhere that's always on the periphery, available to focus on if you choose, but most of the time,
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it just lingers in the background rhythm of your environment.
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When you decide to look at the thing, you see that you have a clear view of the bottom
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You see a mound of sand which has been forming for as long as you can remember, culminating.
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There's plenty of room in the bulb, or perhaps it's getting a bit full.
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You would think that both of those might provide clues as to how long this whole process might
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But then you try to look at the top bulb, which holds the remaining sand grains yet to
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But the top bulb is shrouded by an opaque curtain, which hangs just above the narrow channel.
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You don't know how many grains remain, but yet, more grains continue to fall.
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This hourglass is something like the human condition, an awareness of death, the impossibility of
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seeing the full picture, and a paralyzingly strange situation which constantly teeters between
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anxiety, denial, stoicism, gratitude, and urgency, with the knowledge that this hourglass exists
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This compilation will adjust that hourglass to a place of central focus, making it available
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This is something Sam insists can and should be done in an honest and intimate way, and
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that being mindful of death's ever-present seat at the table of our experience is actually
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in direct service of bringing us back to life, ourselves, and each other.
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You will hear this same insight arrived at through many different paths in these conversations.
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As this ten-part series nears its conclusion with the final two episodes, it's a good time
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The modern human condition is one which is subject to an onslaught of seemingly novel technological
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hurdles, relentlessly morphing geopolitical configurations, and up-to-the-second information
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It can feel like a dizzying bombardment where the struggle just to stay current and in contact
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The act of revisiting thoughts, observations, conversations, and considerations from years
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ago is out of fashion, and lately seems to take extra concerted efforts.
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But some topics and conversations have an eternally relevant and evergreen quality to them.
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Some observations, even the ones with logical mistakes which have been exposed by the benefit
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of hindsight, take on an important light upon revisitation.
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But perhaps no other topic fits the descriptor of evergreen as much as the one featured in
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There will be three themes braided together throughout the conversations you're about to hear.
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These three threads are fundamentally intertwined, yet distinct.
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The death thread has an infinite and homogenous quality to it.
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The way in which death is experienced, which is to say, not experienced, the very absence
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of experience, is something like the surprisingly controversial philosophical notion of nothing.
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Without diverting our path too much at the start, we'll note that a deep contemplation on
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the nature of nothingness is bewildering, and constantly borders on mistakenly giving a somethingness
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When speaking about death, this mistake is often made when death is imagined or feared
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as something like darkness and silence forever.
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Analogizing nothing to death is like saying that you will experience death in the same manner
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in which you experienced Paris, France at 1113 AM in the year 1292, which is to say that
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And before you existed, the idea of Paris, France in that year carried no meaning, no connotation,
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This is the same realization which underpins the classic observation from the ancient Greek
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So, of the three ideas braided together in this compilation, death does not actually leave
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But the way in which its ever-present stitching and the fabric of our existence informs the other
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two ideas, dying and life, is the source from which many important and illuminating ideas
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Let's now hear from Sam himself, from the introduction to episode 104, with Frank Ostasecki,
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This will be our first clip to lay out how being mindful of death paints a shade of absurdity
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over many of our daily interactions, non-interactions, and flights from life.
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Well, today's topic is a topic we all think about, while doing our best not to think about
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And how we think about death changes depending on whether we're thinking about dying ourselves
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But whichever side of the coin we take here, death is really an ever-present reality for
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And it is so whether we're thinking about it or not.
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It's always announcing itself in the background, on the news, in the stories we hear about the
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lives of others, in our concerns about our own health.
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In the attention we pay when crossing the street, if you observe yourself closely, you'll see that
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you spend a fair amount of energy each day trying not to die.
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And has long been noted by philosophers and contemplatives and poets, death makes a mockery of almost
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Just take a moment to reflect on how you've spent your day, so far.
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The kinds of things that captured your attention.
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The things that you've been genuinely worried about.
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Think of the last argument you had with your spouse.
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Think of the last hour you spent on social media.
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Think of the last few days, I've been spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find
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So if you had stopped me at any point in the last 48 hours and asked me what I'm up to,
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what really concerns me, what deep problem I'm attempting to solve, the solution to which
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seems most likely to bring order to the chaos in my corner of the universe, the honest answer
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Now, I'm not saying that everything we do has to be profound in every moment.
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I mean, sometimes you just have to find a font.
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But contemplating the brevity of life brings some perspective to how we use our attention.
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It's not so much what we pay attention to, it's the quality of attention.
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If you need to spend the next hour looking for a font, you might as well enjoy it.
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Because the truth is, none of us know how much time we have in this life.
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And taking that fact to heart brings a kind of moral and emotional clarity and energy to
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And it can bring a resolve to not suffer over stupid things.
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This is probably the quintessential example of misspent energy.
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You're behind the wheel of your car, and somebody does something erratic, or they're probably
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Now, I would submit to you that that kind of thing is impossible if you're being mindful
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If you're aware that you're going to die, and that the other person is going to die, and
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that you're both going to lose everyone you love, and you don't know when, you've got this
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moment of life, this beautiful moment, this moment where your consciousness is bright, where
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it's not dimmed by morphine in the hospital on your last day among the living, and the sun
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is out, or it's raining, both are beautiful, and your spouse is alive, and your children
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And you're not in some failed state where civilians are being rounded up and murdered
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And that person in front of you, who you will never meet, whose hopes and sorrows you
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know nothing about, but which if you could know them, you would recognize are impressively
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So, this is your life, the only one you've got, and you will never get this moment back
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And you don't know how many more moments you have.
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No matter how many times you do something, there will come a day when you do it for the
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You've had a thousand chances to tell the people closest to you that you love them, in a way
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that they feel it, and in a way that you feel it.
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And you don't know how many more you're going to get.
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You've got this next interaction with another human being to make the world a marginally better
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You've got this one opportunity to fall in love with existence.
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So, you don't know how much time you have left.
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And yet you're free to make the game as interesting as possible.
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You can discover new games that no one has thought of yet.
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You can make games that used to be impossible suddenly possible, and get others to play them
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But whatever you do, however seemingly ordinary, you can feel the preciousness of life.
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And an awareness of death is the doorway into that way of being in the world.
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We'll now listen in on Sam's conversation with Ostasecki.
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Here, they stay on the theme of being mindful of the reality of death as a way to enrich our
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Frank Ostasecki co-founded the Zen Hospice Project in 1987, which integrated Buddhist mindfulness
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He authored a book entitled The Five Invitations, Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living
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Fully, which is where you can find deeper contemplations of the ideas that you'll hear
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This comes from the same episode as the previous clip, episode 104, The Lessons of Death.
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What are the things that people are most confused about, most surprised by?
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What is waiting there to be discovered by someone who really hasn't thought much about death and
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And what is the value of learning those lessons sooner rather than later?
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You know, I mean, I don't know what happens after we die, Sam.
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But I think that without a reminder of death, we tend to take our life for granted and we
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become lost in these endless pursuits of self-gratification, you know?
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But, you know, as I was mentioning, when we keep it close at hand, you know, at our fingertips,
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I think it reminds us not to hold on so tightly.
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And I think we take ourselves and our ideas a little less seriously.
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And what I find is that when there's a reflection on death, we come to understand that we're
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And I think this helps us to be kinder and gentler to one another, actually.
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You know, the habits of our life, they have a powerful momentum, right?
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They propel us toward, you know, right onto the moment of death.
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And so the obvious question arises, what habits do I want to create?
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Not whether or not they'll give me a better afterlife, but here, in this life, you know,
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And, you know, you know the old story, they develop into habits and harden into character.
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So an unconscious relationship with my thoughts leads me to reactivity.
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And I want to live a life that's more responsible and more, I want to say, clean.
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That's the best way I could, I would describe it.
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Living with an awareness of death is obviously an ancient spiritual practice.
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I mean, this, an admonition that one should do this dates back as far as Socrates and the
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Buddha and several books in the Old Testament, like Ecclesiastes.
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And I think all three of those are more or less contemporaneous with one another, but it
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And so it's no accident that monks and renunciates and contemplatives do this very deliberately.
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They focus on death and they live their lives, they seek to live their lives as though they
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And they're trying to prioritize those things that will be the things that make sense in
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Again, this is often framed by a kind of otherworldly belief, but certainly not always.
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And I remember Stephen Levine, who you just mentioned, at one point decided to live a year
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consciously doing this, consciously living a year as he would want to live a year if it
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But of course, he had more than one more year to live.
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In fact, I think he had at least 20 at that point.
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I mean, there's a bit of a paradox here because there are many things, many good things in
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life, not merely superficial things, that we can only engage, that we can only seek with
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real energy based on the assumption that we will live a fairly long time.
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And I mean, something like the decision to have a child or to spend five or more years
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And in most cases, it is a safe assumption that we have at least an average span of time
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How do you square that with this imperative that we not take life for granted and that
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we use the clarifying wisdom of impermanence in each moment insofar as we're able?
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I mean, I think that one of the things that, one of the ways we can shift the conversation,
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even the one that you and I are having, is that it isn't all about preparing for my death.
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It isn't all about this moment at which I stop breathing, but more about how do I live
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You know, I had a heart attack a few years ago.
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And one of the things I did after that heart attack is I did some reading about other people
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You know, Maslow suffered an afraid heart attack at one point in his life.
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He said, the confrontation with death and the reprieve from it makes everything look so precious,
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so sacred, so beautiful that I feel more strongly than ever the impulse to love it, to embrace
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He said, my river has never looked so beautiful.
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Death in its ever-present possibility makes love, passionate love, more possible.
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It's not just about preparing for this final moment, right?
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But really looking and seeing how does it, what happens if these, if we stop separating life
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and death, if we stop pulling them apart, you know, if we saw them as one thing.
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So for me, one of the things that that does is help me really see the beauty of life.
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I mean, you know, think about the cherry blossoms that cover the hillsides of Japan every spring,
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Or this place where I teach in northern Idaho, where there are these blue flax flowers that
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How come they're so much more beautiful than plastic flowers, you know?
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Isn't it the fact that they will end that is part of their beauty?
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So I think that's true with our human lives as well.
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It's not like, get ready, death is coming, you know, don't screw it up.
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So for me, being with dying is a lot, you know, has built in, built up in me a tremendous
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sense of gratitude and appreciation for the fact that I'm alive.
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And so it isn't just about, you know, trying to cram for a test, you know, this final test
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But what I do know, and this is interesting, Sam, is that everybody's got a story about what
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And my experience is that that story shapes the way in which they die, and in some ways,
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And that's, you know, I remember being with the president of the California Atheist Association
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I was really proud that he came there, that he didn't feel anyone was going to push any
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dogma on him, that we weren't going to try and talk him into some kind of belief system,
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and that it could go the way he needed it to go.
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It's not my job to convince him of something otherwise, you know?
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It's my job to find out what's his vision, you know?
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Actually, I want to ask you about that because it has struck me more and more that secularists
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and atheists are really lacking resources to guide them both when they get sick and need
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to think about their own deaths or confront the deaths of those close to them.
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It just is a fact that there isn't a strong, familiar, secular tradition around how to perform
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I mean, who do you call when someone close to you dies?
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Because no matter how atheistic you are, many people are left calling their rabbi or their priest
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and just asking them to dumb it down because the only people who know how to perform funerals
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and the only language around these moments in life is just explicitly framed by religion.
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I mean, you know, I did hundreds of memorials for people through the AIDS epidemic, you know?
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And most of them had no, you know, as you say, some of them had an early religious training.
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And we can talk about how that influences the way in which we die, by the way.
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We had to draw, you know, ritual, you know how it is with ritual.
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Ritual has this way of bringing forward the truth that's already there in the room, in a way.
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True ritual, different than ceremony, evokes something fundamental in us, we could say.
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It might draw on an ancient wisdom or some, you know, ancient practice, but really it's about
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how do we evoke the truth that's right here, right now?
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That's often what characterized a lot of the memorial services that I did.
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But one of the things that I saw with people, whether they had religious training or not,
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one of the things that really mattered most to them was relationship.
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With the people that they cared about in their lives?
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You know, with reality, however we might define that?
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And so one of the tickets in, if you will, or one of the paths in for people who even
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had sworn off religion years ago, was some sense of interdependence, we might call it,
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I could share hundreds of stories with you about people who had no religious training at
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And so we would work with that, you know, we'd work with that experience as a way of helping
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them ease into the mystery of what happens in dying.
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I mean, look, dying is, we know at least this much.
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We know that dying is much more than a medical event, you know?
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And so the profundity of what occurs in the dying process is too big to fit into any model,
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whether that's a medical model or a religious model.
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It shakes us loose of all of our, you know, all the ways we've defined ourself, all the
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They're either stripped away by illness or they're gracefully given up, but they all go.
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And I think these are questions that people wrestle with in a time, as they come closer
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Of course, if they have some religious or spiritual training, it influences that exploration.
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But, you know, it doesn't, it comes up for people anyway.
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Even those people who think dying is a dial tone, you know, that, you know, where there's
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Even them, their, the reflection on their relationships and how they've conducted those
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I mean, this really big question at the end of people's lives is usually something not
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like, you know, is there life after death, but it's something more like, am I loved?
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You heard Ostasecki mention the American psychologist Abraham Maslow and his encounter with a medical
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diagnosis which brought him psychologically closer to his own death.
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Our next clip features an author and psychologist who wrote specifically about Maslow and will
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You've likely heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
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This was his attempt to model a sort of ordered checklist of universal human needs which are
00:27:04.480
It's been popularly presented as a pyramid, with the lowest and more urgent needs at the
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bottom and the higher, more transcendent needs at the top, only reachable if the foundations
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Maslow never actually drew this hierarchy as a pyramid, and it's difficult to tell if he
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would have ever endorsed this specific presentation.
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But regardless, the idea clearly resonated with the public and persists today.
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At the base of his hierarchy were physiological needs such as food, water, and shelter.
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Once these basic needs are met, individuals then seek safety and security, followed by love
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and belonging, esteem, and ultimately, self-actualization.
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That last piece, the self-actualization one, is the one which really piqued the interest of
00:28:00.860
He wrote a book entitled Transcend, which was his effort to understand what Maslow may
00:28:06.360
have meant by self-actualization, and how it might be applied to our own psychological
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Kaufman picks up on the point which Ostasecki made about a heart attack which Maslow suffered
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in 1967, and how this reminder of his own mortality significantly impacted his work, and in some
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ways, threw a wrench into his entire theory of the hierarchy of needs, and may have crumbled
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This conversation was recorded while uncertainties around mortality and the COVID pandemic occupied
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the world's attention, which provided an interesting backdrop for thinking about death and transcendence.
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This is from episode 209, entitled, A Good Life.
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You know, there's a twist ending to my book, and it's not all about the peak experiences.
00:29:01.800
What Maslow realized towards the end of his life is that really life is about the plateau
00:29:08.460
And that's not a phrase that's used often when people talk about Maslow, they may talk about
00:29:14.540
But his great insight, perhaps his greatest insight, was just the past couple years of
00:29:23.540
And he was confused, because according to his hierarchy of needs model, if he goes down to
00:29:29.760
the bottom of the hierarchy all of a sudden and has these concerns about safety, well, that
00:29:37.560
should block self-actualization and block feelings of transcendence.
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But he wrote in his personal diaries, how can it be that this experience is giving me a
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greater appreciation of my life, and I'm feeling these transcendent experiences more than I
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And it took me facing this mortality to get there.
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It kind of threw out of whack his whole hierarchy, in a sense.
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And in my book, I try to reconcile that paradox.
00:30:08.700
That's one of the most fundamental paradoxes I try to reconcile, because there's one literature
00:30:13.620
in psychology showing that when you face mortality salience on a daily basis, like you live in
00:30:19.480
impoverished neighborhoods, or you live in any, you know, you grow up with a lot of discord
00:30:23.100
or chaos in your environment, you don't experience a lot of these kinds of transcendent peak experiences.
00:30:31.720
You tend to, Daniel Nettle and other evolutionary psychologists have shown you focus on mating.
00:30:41.060
I mean, you focus on the things that you need for survival and reproduction.
00:30:45.460
But it seems like if you can transcend living in that constant state of chaos, and you face
00:30:55.000
mortality, then there's a group of people in the psychological literature that report their
00:31:02.160
They report a really newfound sense of meaning in life, new projects that want to take on
00:31:11.060
And the way I reconcile this is so much of that literature on mortality salience doesn't
00:31:19.140
take, doesn't look at individual differences in deprivation of needs.
00:31:23.240
So I think there is a great value in transcending your need for your basic needs.
00:31:30.760
So transcending your incessant need for esteem, self-esteem, transcending your incessant need
00:31:36.240
for connection with only the people that you feel a connection to, as opposed to a connection
00:31:43.980
You can transcend, and this is a big one because obviously some people don't have a choice in
00:31:48.800
the matter if they're born in certain neighborhoods or environments where there's a lot of violence
00:31:55.140
It's easier said than done to just transcend it.
00:31:57.760
But if you can transcend it so that these basic needs are not, you're not preoccupied with
00:32:04.440
The research I've seen shows that mortality salience under that state of consciousness
00:32:10.160
actually gives you the heightened, most heightened states of transcendence that a person
00:32:16.660
So this was a big sort of paradox I was trying to reconcile with these two dueling literatures.
00:32:22.420
You know, on the one hand, mortality salience leading to momentary concerns of survival and
00:32:27.960
And then this other literature in positive psychology showing that mortality salience can lead to greater
00:32:35.560
I guess almost everything we're talking about is susceptible to this dual, you know, it's almost
00:32:40.880
the pre-trans distinction that Ken Wilber made.
00:32:44.160
I have not found a lot of use for Ken Wilber in my thinking about these things, but perhaps we could go
00:32:51.860
But he famously gave us this pre-trans fallacy, which is the pre-rational can sound a lot like the
00:33:00.540
And this is sort of contextualizes Freud's dismissal of mystical experience as the oceanic feeling.
00:33:08.300
This is a return to childhood or a return to infancy.
00:33:11.840
This is the pre-rational mind, you know, wallowing in its own energies.
00:33:17.640
And Ken Wilber, I think, quite usefully pointed out that it can sound like that, but the transcendence
00:33:24.440
of separation that one can experience after one has the full toolkit of rationality on board
00:33:34.240
It's the trans-rational, so it's hence the pre-trans fallacy.
00:33:39.100
But yeah, many of these points, like when you think about, this is somewhere near the hull
00:33:45.000
of the boat, the feeling of like a self-efficacy that you can do things well and that you can
00:33:51.500
master various challenges and, you know, the antithesis of the learned helplessness that
00:34:00.440
You want that, but if you keep going in that healthy direction, you also recognize that you
00:34:09.720
Ultimately, it's a mystery as to whether or not I'm going to get to the end of the sentence
00:34:16.480
And when I make a mistake, I didn't control that.
00:34:18.500
When I do it successfully, I didn't control that.
00:34:20.460
You know, this is, on some level, I'm a witness to this performance, and so it is with all
00:34:30.460
We're hanging out over the precipice every moment, just as a matter of physical health.
00:34:36.020
When are you going to have a stroke or a heart attack?
00:34:39.860
This is just a probability distribution over each moment that you have to learn to live with.
00:34:46.400
And, yeah, it's, this pandemic has taught many of us that history can swallow up a society
00:34:53.860
with nothing more than a microbe born of a sneeze or cough, you know, on a moment's notice.
00:34:59.620
And we're still trying to dig out from the implications of all this with the understanding
00:35:04.060
that it could have been 10 times worse and may yet be 10 times worse the next time around.
00:35:09.240
So it's the sense that we really can control anything is an illusion, and yet, at one level,
00:35:16.280
and that's not to nullify the difference between feeling self-efficacy in the midst of one's
00:35:21.700
various projects and feeling like one can't do anything worth doing.
00:35:28.300
You know, I don't know if I've resolved that paradox, but it's, I think it's the degree of
00:35:32.240
focus, kind of the wide angle or the microscopic focus, each can be useful by turns.
00:35:39.740
And the microscopic focus reveals that control is imaginary.
00:35:44.200
The wide angle is, there's orderly behavior and getting what one wants out of life and
00:35:53.180
Yeah, at the heart of a lot of what you're saying, and you're saying a lot of really
00:35:56.860
good stuff, at the heart of a lot of it is the fear of uncertainty.
00:36:02.960
You can live your life with a fear of uncertainty, and the greater, and sort of a linear way, the
00:36:09.040
greater the fear, the more we go into this state, psychologists have identified, psychological
00:36:13.800
entropy, where we, at the ultimate extreme, we just can't cope and we get depression, we feel
00:36:21.580
Or you can live in a constant state of exploration.
00:36:26.360
And exploration means that you are actively exploring the unknown.
00:36:31.060
The unknown excites you, the unknown entices you.
00:36:35.080
The more you can master and challenge the unknown, the happier you are in your life.
00:36:41.800
So I think that we're constantly, to be human is to be constantly pulled in one way or another.
00:36:48.420
I'm a big fan of not acting as though anyone's above anyone else.
00:36:53.420
And they've reached some highest state that they're no longer human.
00:36:58.340
To me, to become fully human is recognizing that you have these tendencies within you.
00:37:03.600
And you have to constantly choose the exploration option and learn how to manage the uncertainty
00:37:14.580
You're so right in the sense that this moment puts a lot of things in context for people.
00:37:20.520
You know, it's funny, not funny, it's tragic, but you hear people talking about as though
00:37:25.800
it just dawned on them for the first time in their lives that there's uncertainty in their
00:37:29.180
lives, you know, for some people, maybe this is the first time they've really thought about
00:37:35.000
that, you know, but you could remind them of all the many other things that they've had
00:37:39.740
throughout their lives before this moment that were incredibly uncertain and could have led
00:37:44.080
to a lot of danger and people still made decisions and people still did certain things.
00:37:49.820
This is kind of like, because it's on the news, you know, we're all so focused on this
00:37:53.900
being the great uncertainty when we could create a news program with 40 million other forms
00:37:59.680
of uncertainty that you have during the course of your day.
00:38:01.840
I, you know, I say, I bet you didn't know about this could happen to you today too, you
00:38:06.020
So I think just the heart of a lot of what you're saying is living a life of, are you
00:38:11.580
really going to live that life with a spirit of exploration and openness to new experiences
00:38:16.500
and curiosity for the unknown or are you committed to, to fearing it and, and having that illusion
00:38:24.720
of control because obviously, you know, and Alan Watts wrote so beautifully about this and
00:38:30.500
we, the only certainty is that there's uncertainty.
00:38:35.840
In that clip, you heard some echoes of Sam's arguments relating to the illusory nature of
00:38:41.980
We have compilations dedicated to both free will and consciousness, which are both natural
00:38:50.340
For what is death other than a place where consciousness ceases to carry its own mystery?
00:38:57.500
At this intersection of the exploration of consciousness and the awareness of death, we're going to introduce
00:39:05.020
Griffiths has been spearheading psychedelic research at Johns Hopkins University School
00:39:14.280
Most of his research is focused on the use of psilocybin and its effects on spirituality and
00:39:21.820
He often speaks about the profoundly transformative effects of targeted, limited use of psilocybin.
00:39:27.920
And among those who have taken it, there are near-universal subjective observations that it produced
00:39:34.400
experiences that were not only beautiful and meaningful, but also true.
00:39:40.940
Sam shares Griffiths' interest in this area of study, and in particular, is interested in
00:39:46.860
how it relates to anxieties about dying and the suffering associated with it.
00:39:50.960
In 2021, Griffiths posted a video to his website, in which he was providing a regular update on
00:40:01.320
After a few minutes of outlining the importance of the program generally, Griffiths shifted to
00:40:10.440
In my remaining minutes, I'd like to conclude by sharing some very personal observations that
00:40:16.620
bear on this topic of spirituality and well-being.
00:40:20.960
Ten months ago, I went in for a routine screening colonoscopy.
00:40:27.320
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