Dr. Sam Harris joins Dr. Jordan Peterson to discuss the Isought Problem, religion, psychedelics, perception and attention, and more. Dr. Harris is a philosopher and neuroscientist, a New York Times bestselling author, the host of the Making Sense Podcast, and the creator of Waking Up, a meditation app informed by decades of first-hand experience under various teachers and traditions. He s practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers, both in the U.S. and abroad. He holds a degree in philosophy from Stanford and a Ph.D in neuroscience from UCLA. His books include The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, and Waking up. Sam hosts the popular Making Sense podcast, and is also the Creator of the Wakingup App, which offers a modern, rational approach to the practice of meditation and an ongoing exploration of what it means to live a good life. He s also the author of five books and five bestsellers, including The Isought problem, which focuses on our developing understanding of ourselves and how we should live a developing sense of the world. His work covers a wide range of topics, including neuroscience, morality, moral philosophy, and political polarization, but generally focuses on the development of our sense of ourselves, and a sense of who we are and what we should be. In this episode, Dr. Peterson and Sam discuss how we can learn from each other, and why we should try to live the best lives we can live in the best we can, not the world we live in which we are all of our best. in which is a place where we can be best understood. We re all in it together. And we re all of us can be good enough, and we can all be better at being good at being better at living the life we deserve to be good at it, not better than we deserve it. This episode is sponsored by Daily Wire Plus, which means we get exclusive access to pre-sale tickets for shows and monthly Ask Me Anything episodes where memberships, where members submit the questions submitted by you, the listeners choose to be included in the show. Subscribe to DailyWire Plus! to get access to future episodes of the show and access to early-bird tickets for future episodes, and early release tickets to future shows, and much more! Subscribe today!
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00:00:51.040Welcome to Season 4, Episode 81 of the JBP Podcast.
00:05:45.440Well, you know, it was very interesting, because, you know, as you know, and as, as your, your fans know, you really did kind of come out of nowhere, like a, you know, on a rocket like trajectory, right?
00:05:57.400So you were somebody I had never heard of.
00:05:59.720And then all of a sudden, you were the most requested person for my, from my audience to have on the podcast.
00:06:06.980And then we did that first podcast that you mentioned, where we got bogged down on questions of epistemology.
00:06:11.600And, um, which I, you know, I think I haven't listened to it since, but I, I still think it was a useful conversation.
00:06:19.920And many people found it very valuable.
00:06:21.360I mean, you know, it's just to, to either to my advantage or your advantage, people found it valuable.
00:06:25.900Uh, they heard what they, some heard what they wanted to hear in it, and some, some had their minds, uh, bent around as, um, as was intended.
00:06:35.140But, uh, people, most people, many people certainly felt, felt it was a kind of failed experiment in conversation and we should try it again.
00:06:43.940And then we had a, a much more amicable discussion on my podcast and that planted the seed for these, uh, public events.
00:06:53.240And if, if, if memory serves, we had one event booked in Vancouver and you were still not quite the famous Jordan Peterson yet.
00:07:03.660And then in like, in the, you know, 15 days it took us to actually get to that event, um, your star had risen so quickly that we recognized that, I mean, the promoter recognized that we had to book a, uh, another event immediately, uh, after, you know, so the next night we, we, so we had two back-to-back events in Vancouver.
00:07:25.400Um, and then, yeah, those, those subsequent events with you were really a lot of fun because we were disagreeing very stridently about fairly existential topics.
00:07:38.460And by the time we got to London and, and, uh, Dublin, we had these immense audiences that were, were segmented in ways that I had never quite experienced.
00:07:50.260I, I, I've been in front of, you know, my home team audience and I've been in front of a hostile audience, but I've never been in front of an audience where, you know, fully 50% or 60, 40, I mean, who, I don't know what the split was at that point, but, you know, thousands of people were on one team and thousands of people were on another team for questions of God and faith and meaning.
00:08:09.300And yeah, but everybody was on board for the discussion.
00:08:12.700And you remember one thing that happened, this was in Vancouver, we were going to switch to a Q and A and we asked the audience essentially if they wanted the discussion to continue because we were in the middle of it, or if they wanted to switch to the Q and A and it was overwhelming support of the audience for the discussion to continue, which I thought was quite remarkable.
00:08:32.140Um, yeah, so it was, uh, it was a lot of fun and, uh, there was just a tremendous amount of energy.
00:08:37.920I mean, to have eight or 9,000 people show up for a, uh, an intellectual discussion, really, I mean, it was, it did have the character somewhat of a debate, but it was not framed as anything like a formal debate.
00:08:50.760And we were really just having a conversation and agreeing where we agreed and disagreeing where we disagreed.
00:08:56.560And it was, um, anyway, I found it to be a lot of fun and-
00:09:07.300It's like, why in the world was what it was that we were talking about attractive to so many thousands of people?
00:09:16.520Well, I mean, you know, when you look at the full sweep of what we cover, I mean, in those particular conversations, we weren't focusing on areas that we, we agree about much more.
00:09:27.420I mean, we, you know, you know, you and I, if we're, if you're going to turn us loose on questions of, um, you know, moral panic around identity politics and social justice hysteria, you know, you and I will agree, I think probably 90% or more on many of those topics.
00:09:43.400Um, and I don't recall us touching any of that, but that, but that, but that was in the, in the background, it was certainly, it was certainly the wind in your sails, you know, making you more and more prominent at that point because you had hit, hit those topics so hard.
00:09:58.780Um, but, you know, the topics we were touching, questions of, of, you know, what is reality and how we should live within it really, you know, the fundamental questions of, of, you know, what it means to live a good life.
00:10:14.620What are the requisites for living a good life? Uh, how should we think about our place in the universe so as to have the best chance of living a good life? Um, these are the most important questions anyone ever asks, provided they have sufficient freedom to even worry about such things, right?
00:10:32.780I mean, if the, if the, if the wolf is at the door or in the room, well, then people really, for the most part, don't have the luxury of, of worrying about whether they're as ethical or as honest or as, uh, profoundly engaged with the, the present moment, um, as they might be.
00:10:50.260But once you get to something like, you know, first world concerns where you have enough material abundance where you're, you know, survival is not a question.
00:11:01.660And when, when, when political stability is sufficient that you're not continually worried that, you know, your neighbors are going to murder you, um, then you're, then it really, I mean, then, then we, you know, when you, when you, when you wake up at three in the morning and can't get back to sleep, you're thinking about what, what does this all mean?
00:11:21.840And what's, you know, what is a good life?
00:11:23.480One of the things that we did agree on, I think that sort of provided a container for the discussions in total was that there was potentially such a thing as the good life, that that's just not some, you know, epiphenomenal abstraction or something like that, but something central.
00:11:43.320And to some degree, I think we disagreed about where the information for deriving what might constitute the good life comes from, but it isn't even clear to me exactly where those differences lie.
00:11:58.980And that was part of, I suppose, the fun of the discussion and something that I also hope to continue today, because I've seen since then, it seems to me that you've turned your attention more and more, perhaps not more and more, but you certainly continued your route into investigation of what constitutes the good life.
00:12:17.620And, and, and also your attempts to bring what you've learned to perhaps an increasingly wide audience using the technology that you're using now, this app that you have, which is the waking up app.
00:12:30.860My wife has subscribed to that for the last year and a half.
00:12:35.180And I joked with you earlier that she probably spent more time with you than she has with me in the last year and a half.
00:12:40.060So that's quite, quite comical, but she finds it's quite useful.
00:12:43.360And, and I took a good look at it today.
00:12:45.600How, how does, tell me about that app and why you're doing that?
00:12:50.020Are you doing that instead of writing a book or is it another book?
00:12:54.660Well, I seem to be doing everything instead of writing a book.
00:12:57.720Writing a book is, has become an opportunity cost that I can't justify at the moment, but no doubt I will write another book at some point.
00:13:05.400But yeah, between my podcast and app, that's really, those are the two channels where I am putting out my ideas at this point.
00:13:15.860Well, I looked at the app and one of the things you're doing is you've broken down lectures in some sense into like 10 minute chunks that are focused on different topics.
00:13:27.460I've got the app right here and I'm assuming my phone.
00:13:31.160And so there's groups of lectures, fundamentals, mind and emotion, the illusory self, mysteries and paradoxes.
00:13:39.080And some of the topics, for example, the illusory self, self and other alone with others, looking in the mirror, the art of doing nothing, mysteries and paradoxes.
00:13:52.760In some ways, it looks like a book, right?
00:13:55.540It's got chapters, it's got sub chapters, but why, why this, why this technology and, and how is it performed for you in comparison to a book?
00:14:04.620Well, so I did write the book version of this content or certainly most of this content.
00:14:09.580And so I have a book, Waking Up, and it touches, you know, it is my attempt to ground so-called spiritual experience, you know, experiences like self-transcendence and unconditional love and the kinds of things people experience on, you know, various psychedelics, you know, this is all of increasing interest to people.
00:14:29.640Now, I wanted to ground all of that in what I consider to be a rational, empirical understanding of the world, right?
00:14:37.440I didn't want to believe anything on insufficient evidence so as to prop up the importance of these experiences because they don't, they don't actually need to be propped up by, by, by, you know, in my view, faith or any unjustified claim to knowledge.
00:14:54.820And they do, you know, at very interesting points, deliver their own kind of knowledge about the nature of the mind.
00:15:01.740I mean, there are things you can recognize directly in your experience that puts your understanding of your own subjectivity in closer register with what we understand about the brain, right?
00:15:15.460Now, not everything can be, can be cashed out experientially, but many things can.
00:15:25.120Well, I, okay, so that's, there's a bunch of that that I agree with deeply.
00:15:30.860And one of the things I've tried to do to the degree that it was possible when talking about, let's say, matters that could be religious,
00:15:38.120I've tried to stay out of the religious territory as much as possible because it seems to me counterproductive to make an appeal to faith.
00:15:46.100Would you can make an appeal to, well, what would you, to, not just to experience, it's deeper than that, to something like the combination of experience and science.
00:15:54.580So let me run something by you as an example and see what you think of this.
00:15:59.120Because one of the things that we really sparred about, I suppose, or discussed was the, the is ought conundrum, right?
00:16:08.000We, we agree that you have to have oughts because you have to act and that's the, that landscape of value.
00:16:14.520But we ran into some trouble, I think, trying to make our viewpoints about where those oughts might be derived from.
00:16:22.680You seem to be more convinced than me, perhaps, that the step from is to ought was simpler.
00:16:30.100And I was more convinced that it was more complicated and there were problems that still remain there.
00:16:37.080I'll let you respond to that, but I wanted to talk about this deeper experience.
00:16:40.800So I was standing with my wife the other day on the dock of this cottage we have up north and it's very dark up here.
00:16:47.080And so when you look up, you can see the night sky well enough to see the Milky Way and actually to see galaxies if you use the corner of your eye.
00:16:54.200And, and so, and one of the things that's associated with that is an experience of awe.
00:17:00.740And it's not surprising because there you are confronting what's essentially infinite as far as you're concerned, as much as it might be for us.
00:17:09.060And I thought a lot about the experience of awe.
00:17:12.540One of the things, and it's also produced by music quite regularly.
00:17:16.020One of the things that happens when you experience awe is that a vestigial piloerection mechanism kicks in.
00:17:24.040And that's the mechanism that makes prey animals puff up.
00:17:55.240And it seems to me as well that it's associated very tightly with our instinct to imitate.
00:18:01.420And it's strange to think that you could look at the night sky and that could catalyze a, in, an instinct to imitate.
00:18:09.040But we're very, we're very good at using abstraction, us creatures.
00:18:13.640And it's not exactly obvious what we can imitate and what we can't.
00:18:18.140So I think that's an example of this idea that you're putting forward, that the domain of religious experience, let's say, or spiritual experience, has a biological underpinning, a deep biological underpinning.
00:18:34.180And, you know, part of my question is, well, what's the, what are the implications of that exactly, if that, if that happens to be the case?
00:18:43.100So first, I'd like to know if you agree about that discussion about awe and the is and ought thing.
00:18:47.940And then anything else you'd like to add, I'd like to hear.
00:18:50.520Yeah, well, you've opened many doors there.
00:18:53.220That's a, I see a 10-hour conversation treating just those topics.
00:18:57.780But, well, to start with the is-ought bit, you're in very good company.
00:19:03.240Most people in science and philosophy, as you know, believe there really is a, a, a disjunction between is and ought.
00:19:10.120And to follow Hume's really cast aside remarks, I mean, he didn't go into it deeply, but, but at one point he wrote that you can't derive an ought from an is, right?
00:19:22.880There's no description of the way the world is that can tell you how it ought to be.
00:19:25.820So, and he was, he was decrying the fact that so many scholars and in general, so many theologians in his time would move smoothly from is to ought without acknowledging that they had, had committed a logical error.
00:19:41.800But I do think there's a trick of language lurking at the bottom of this is and ought talk that is misleading.
00:19:47.560And, and, and it's, it's difficult to spot and, you know, I believe I've spotted it and, and, but I, I do, you know, the people who don't agree with me don't agree with me.
00:19:58.600I mean, their intuitions don't pass through, you know, the point where I'm, I'm trying to shove them.
00:20:05.920And, you know, it's somewhat analogous to, you know, the philosopher Wittgenstein made a point when he was criticizing Freud, he was criticizing Freud's notion of the unconscious.
00:20:14.200He didn't, he thought this reification of the unconscious was, was fallacious.
00:20:19.040And, you know, we can leave that aside.
00:20:20.320I don't, you know, that's, I'm not sure I agree with him there, but the, the point he was making about the power of language was interesting.
00:20:26.800He said, imagine if instead of saying, I saw nobody in the room, we said, I saw Mr. Nobody in the room.
00:20:37.940Imagine a language that forced us to say, I saw Mr. Nobody, right?
00:20:41.420Just, just imagine what confusion would be born of that convention of language.
00:20:46.620That's something he said in his, I think it was in the blue book.
00:20:50.020And there are many places in our thinking about the world where language plays a similarly confusing role where we have reified something, which is not.
00:21:02.500Yeah, no, so I think it's a confused, it's confused us about free will.
00:21:05.640It's confused us about, about death, for instance.
00:21:08.780I mean, I think, well, you know, if you're an atheist who doesn't believe that anything happens after you die, right?
00:21:14.960If you think there's, there's no rebirth, you know, there's no reincarnation.
00:21:19.360And that Eastern picture of karma and rebirth is probably not true.
00:21:23.000And if you think there's no heaven or hell, and if you really think you get something like a dial tone when you die, well, many people are left expecting some kind of oblivion, some kind of positive nothingness, some permanent loss of experience.
00:21:37.580And so this notion of oblivion is a kind of reification.
00:21:45.380But if you think about it more clearly, that's precisely the kind of thing you would not, I mean, if it's simply the end of experience, well, then you're not going to be experiencing the end of experience, right?
00:21:55.300This is not, you didn't experience an absence before you were born.
00:21:59.940Right, well, the idea that you would experience is implicit in the way the question is framed.
00:22:16.640And where death is, we are not, right?
00:22:18.180Like there's just non-overlapping sets of facts, whatever those facts are, if in fact death is the end of experience.
00:22:25.100So, which is to say there's nothing to worry about, really, if death is just the end of anything.
00:22:32.800And so how do you think that relates to the is-odd problem?
00:22:35.760Yeah, so to come back to is and ought, I just think really what we have, I mean, forget about morality, forget about questions of good and evil, forget about any value judgment.
00:22:47.520What I, and try to return your mind to something like the primal circumstance of consciousness, right?
00:22:55.080I mean, just imagine waking up from, you know, a 100-year sleep and you've forgotten everything about yourself and now you're just a mind in a world.
00:23:04.760In some sense, we're all in, we're all potentially in that position in every moment in our lives, you know, just seeing creation afresh, right?
00:23:16.560Seeing this moment of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking for, you know, as though for the first time, you know, clearly.
00:23:22.940Do you know that, have you ever heard of the neurological case?
00:23:28.620I think it was a man who had bilateral hippocampal damage and he was in the psychiatric hospital and he woke up like that every second.
00:23:37.560His wife would, yeah, his wife would come in the room and he'd say, it's as if, it's as if I'm seeing you for the first time.
00:23:43.440He lost that, he lost the imposition of memory on his perception and so every perception was fresh and new.
00:23:50.700Yeah, well, so, and I'm not recommending brain damage to anyone as a way of freshening up experience,
00:23:55.480but there's a non-neurologically compromised way of grasping this intuition, which is it's just in this moment, you know, experience really is potentially totally fresh and totally new.
00:24:12.920And, but for the fact, there's this ever-present layer of our thinking about it, our remembering what just happened, our expecting the next thing that's going to happen.
00:24:24.040And it's really the conversation we're having with ourselves in each moment.
00:24:27.220And meditation is a way of breaking that spell and actually being vividly aware of the present moment in a way that frees you from this automaticity of just viewing everything through your concepts and your discursiveness.
00:24:40.120That's a neurologically justifiable viewpoint too, because it looks like the hippocampal map that more or less keeps track of, in some sense, our memories,
00:24:50.920and then also of our conditional positioning in the world is likely either, it's inhibiting that more primal perception,
00:25:01.040although it's doing it in a very useful manner, generally speaking, because it keeps us oriented enough in the moment so that we focus on the minute details that might be necessary to our survival.
00:25:12.840But it's conceivable that it's simultaneously blinding us to a broader and deeper reality that in some sense is deeply nourishing in the face of suffering.
00:25:24.880Yeah, yeah. And what's more, the mechanism that is tiling over reality with concepts in every moment and keeping us thinking and perseverating about our experience rather than recognizing that we're identical to our experience.
00:25:41.660Let's, let's table this part of the discussion for a second, but this would go under the question of what is the self, you know, what do we mean by self and what might self-transcendence be?
00:25:51.080But this whole mechanism is productive of most, if not all of our psychological suffering, right?
00:25:58.900Like there's just, you know, all of our anxiety and depression and fear and regret and shame and, and, and an inability to love even the people we ostensibly love, you know, in our lives.
00:26:11.980You know, the contraction into self that is so toxic so much of the time, you know, all of our deferring our happiness to some future time where we've met all of these goals that, that, that raise our status in comparison with, you know, everyone else we're comparing ourselves to.
00:26:30.280That whole stratum of, of being a person is a confection of endlessly thinking about ourselves, about our past and our future and even our present.
00:26:40.720And it's possible to punch through that, whether it's through, you know, using psychedelics or practicing meditation or just having, you know, just a, a collision with the present moment that's engineered by something, you know, you're, someone close to you dies or say, you know, something, something changes.
00:27:41.880So I view, so you, you can forget about morality, forget about science, forget about anything for the moment and just recognize that the world is such that we're confronted with a, an ever present navigation problem.
00:27:58.560We have this, the possibility of navigating both personally and collectively to places in the space of all possible experience that are just manifestly terrible, you know, and I, and, and the worst place I call the worst possible misery for everyone, right?
00:28:14.600So it is possible to imagine a universe where every conscious system suffers as much as it possibly can for as long as it can, you know, some, some version of the perfect hell, right?
00:28:25.680And then there's, then it's possible to recognize that whatever you want to call it, whether you, whether you want to use words like good and evil or right and wrong or not, every other place on the, what I call the moral landscape is better than the worst possible misery for everyone.
00:28:42.540Yeah. I agree with that completely. That's why I studied atrocity for so long, because I figured if I could find out what the worst thing was, that would be a pointer to the best thing, because if you know the worst thing, then the opposite of that is the best thing, whatever that is, that doesn't mean you have to propositionalize it. It's not even that easy to do.
00:29:01.560And there may be many opposites of that. It may not just be one best possible place on the landscape. There could be many peaks and valleys on the moral landscape, and there could be peaks that are,
00:29:12.540not equivalent in anything but the fact that they are equally distant from the worst possible misery for everyone, right? So there could be, so I'm not, you know, this, this can sound like moral relativism, but it's not, it's, it's, it's an objective picture of morality.
00:29:28.660Yes. But, but it's just to say that there are, there may be, there may be very different ways of living, where given the, given the right kind of minds involved, you could be happy in very strange ways, and in ways that, you know, would be counterintuitive for, you know, apes like ourselves.
00:29:45.460But nonetheless, they could be very far from the worst possible misery for everyone.
00:29:51.320So in any case, I call this, so whatever you want to call navigating in this space, moving away from just unendurable, pointless misery, right, toward, you know, beauty and creativity and joy and love and, you know, all of the good stuff we recognize.
00:30:09.600Because, and again, there's, there's, there's no, we haven't seen the horizon of this, we have no idea how beautiful life could be for, for minds like our own or, or minds, you know, significantly more sensitive and creative and intelligent than our own.
00:30:24.460Had a vision of heaven as a place that was perfect, where everyone that was in it was striving to make it better.
00:30:31.280Right, right. Yeah. So there's, there's some, we don't know how good things can get, and we don't know how bad things can get, but we know they can get.
00:30:39.440Quite terrible from where our current vantage point, and we know they can get quite wonderful from our current vantage point.
00:30:44.880And this is where the distance between facts and values collapses for me.
00:31:25.380I mean, so there, there are things, so it is truly possible to not know what you don't know.
00:31:30.480It's truly possible to not know what you're missing, right, for there to be some happier place on the landscape that you could get to if only you knew to try to get to it.
00:31:40.180But you're not trying to get to it because you're satisfied, you know, drinking 12 beers a night and, you know, cheating on your wife or whatever it is.
00:31:48.220You could have a whole civilization that is unaware of just-
00:31:53.660It's a local peak, but yes, not as good as it might be.
00:31:57.540Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:32:03.060Most of the time you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:32:10.800In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:32:15.760Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with the technical know-how to intercept it.
00:32:25.260And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:32:28.460With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:32:35.840Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:36:45.660So, for example, a six-month-old who crawls towards a visual cliff, which is a plate of glass stretched over a, or placed over a falling-off place.
00:37:43.160And so even that is-ought distinction is deceptive in a very fundamental sense because it's predicated on the idea that what we see are meaningless objects and that we lay an overlay of meaning on top of that.
00:37:58.060And it's not by no means obvious at all that that's how we see.
00:38:02.640And that's part of the reason why it's been so difficult to make machines that can see and act in the real world.
00:38:08.280Because the object world is not simple.
00:38:11.420And that value structure that you're describing, that value structure, right, that is embedded in all of our perceptions in ways that we are only beginning to understand scientifically.
00:38:25.240Yeah, there's so many ways in which our, you know, what's called folk psychological sense of what our minds do is just completely broken, right?
00:38:38.920And we have a sense of the tools we're using to do anything, you know, beliefs, desires, perceptions, expectations, the movement of attention, right?
00:38:52.520And our sense of what all of this is from the first person side has definitely broken apart in many respects as we've studied these things neuroscientifically and psychologically from the third person side.
00:39:07.380And understanding ourselves, understanding the world and our place within it and what's possible is inevitably a marriage of those two sides.
00:39:16.940I mean, you can't fully banish first person experience because most of what we know about ourselves has a cash value in terms of the experiential side.
00:39:29.100I mean, to take the greatest case, there's simply no evidence of consciousness anywhere in the universe, but for the fact that we know it to exist in ourselves from the first person side.
00:39:41.980I mean, you can't look at a brain, even a living one, and form any intuition that it's a locus of consciousness.
00:39:49.680It's only by correlating changes in the experience of living people with, you know, tools of neuroimaging in this case, or things like EEG, where we say, okay, well, when the brain's doing that, there's something that it's like to experience those changes, right?
00:40:05.060And we pretend rather often to take the third person science side off the gold standard of first person experience and say, okay, well, that's really, you know, the mind may be an illusion, you know, maybe even consciousness is an illusion.
00:40:20.900What we know is happening is that our brains that are processing information and we've got things like synapses and neuromodulators and neurotransmitters.
00:40:43.580There's no, you can't banish the side which is, in fact, cashing out so many of your claims about the nature of, in this case, the brain.
00:40:55.400And, but that's not to say that we can't be deeply mistaken from the first person side about what our minds are doing.
00:41:06.600I mean, so, you know, I'm a, you know, as you, as we've indicated here already, I'm an enormous fan of meditation.
00:41:12.040I think it's, I think it's indispensable for understanding certain things about the nature of the mind.
00:41:17.260But you can't even tell that you have a brain by meditating, right?
00:41:23.140Much less, you know, what it's doing, right?
00:41:25.340So it's like, there's things that you, there are some major blind spots in first person experience, no matter how you train experience.
00:41:33.280But you can notice, for instance, that the sense of self, the sense that you're a subject interior to your experience, that you're a kind of a locus of a consciousness that is appropriating experience.
00:41:49.620That is, that is an illusion, or at best, a convention, right?
00:41:54.640A kind of construction that you can cease to construct.
00:42:07.860I want to make, I want to make one observation before we go back to that.
00:42:11.260So, well, one of the things I learned when I was studying ancient Egyptian mythology was that the Egyptians worshipped Horus, that's the eye.
00:42:25.080And we may have talked about this before, but they weren't worshipping rationality.
00:42:30.880They weren't worshipping that monkey mind.
00:42:32.940They were worshipping attention itself, and they regarded attention as the process that revitalized dead totalitarianism, because they had a god for that.
00:45:19.000I'm doing my best to look at your eye to the exclusion of everything else.
00:45:22.240But if, you know, if a mouse ran across my desk, all of a sudden that would have 100% of my attention.
00:45:27.780And that, so it's that shift, it's the shift of the spotlight, that, that's the, that's the attentional mechanism that is happening within this larger context of what I would call consciousness or awareness, because it's, you know.
00:45:40.880So, you're using attention as something like a, like the fovea.
00:46:02.160And then, so, you could think of, maybe we could distinguish these two concepts this way.
00:46:07.460So, at, in the center of your vision at the fovea, it's extraordinarily high resolution consciousness, which we call attention.
00:46:14.520And then, as you move out from the fovea to the periphery, your, your consciousness becomes lower and lower resolution until out here, if you're speaking visually, you can't even really count the number of fingers that you see.
00:46:28.580You can see the hands only if they move.
00:46:37.080And you can move your eyes to put that high resolution, high neurological vision to work.
00:46:44.860Yeah, I would, I would use the terminology a little differently here, though, because I wouldn't say that consciousness is diminishing at the edges.
00:46:51.360I would say that the visual perception is.
00:46:53.760So, consciousness is just the fact that anything is being known, right?
00:46:58.260So, you can be conscious, for instance, of, of very blurry vision, right?
00:47:02.740Or you can be conscious that you're blind, that you can't see anything, right?
00:47:05.380But like, if you just close your eyes now, even your visual consciousness is just as present.
00:47:12.420It's just, you're, you're just aware of this, the darkness behind your eyelids, right?
00:47:21.800So, we could say that you've got that high resolution attention in the middle, then it gets lower resolution out to here where you can't see.
00:47:28.160And then that's all contained within a broader attentional field.
00:47:42.200So, now we know exactly what we mean by our terms.
00:47:44.480And so, and so what I would, what I would say to your question, which I think is a very important question, you know, what's the point of, of examining the self, you know, much less transcending it?
00:47:59.040I mean, what the main one is, is that it is the, the string upon which all of our suffering is, is strung.
00:48:07.560I mean, it's just, it is just, it is, when you feel as miserable as you can feel, that sense of being at the center of this torment, and like, what direction will you find relief, right?
00:48:25.020I mean, this is, this is just, this is, you've got the cacophony of unpleasant experience, and then you've got this place in the middle of it, or apparent place in the middle of it, from which you're trying to resist this experience, right?
00:48:37.940Or figure, trying to figure out how to change it, right?
00:48:39.860So, let's say you have a terrible pain, you know, somewhere in your body.
00:48:44.760You know, there's the pain, there's the strong stimulus of unpleasant sensation, you know, the burning and, and stabbing and twisting feeling.
00:48:53.500And then there's this reaction to it from, apparently, some point outside the pain, very likely, you know, for most people, up in the head.
00:49:02.860I mean, most people feel like they're a subject in their heads that is not, not truly coincident with the rest of their body.
00:49:11.400They don't feel, most people, for the most part, don't feel identical to their bodies.
00:49:14.980They feel like they have bodies, and these bodies can misbehave in various ways.
00:49:18.720And again, so you have a terrible pain, the pain's down there, let's say it's in your knee, you're up here, now a hostage, being tortured by the misbehavior of the rest of your body, right?
00:49:33.860And you're resisting, you're trying to, you're trying to find some way of resisting these sensations.
00:49:39.040And so it is with emotional distress or unpleasant thoughts, right?
00:49:44.260You know, you can have thoughts that terrorize you.
00:49:47.680And all of it seems to suggest, I mean, this is, you know, this is the extreme case of, of stark unhappiness.
00:49:54.740But even in the best of times, right, even when things are going really well, and every experience is very smooth, and we're getting what we want, and, you know, we, you know, our favorite treats are just an arm's length away, and we're filling our mouths with gumdrops or whatever it is, we're, we're gratifying this thing at the center of our experience.
00:50:16.000And it can never be finally gratified because experience itself is impermanent.
00:50:21.600It's just, you know, it's just, you, you get to the thing you want, and you gorge yourself on it, and then not only-
00:50:30.380I mean, then you need a drink of water because this, this lingering taste in your mouth of chocolate mousse or whatever it is, is too cloying and too much, and you got to wash that out so that you're just, I mean, you wouldn't want to stay in that state even if you could.
00:50:42.140And there's some, there's, there's kind of this rolling dissatisfaction, even in satisfaction that we all encounter, even in the best of times, right, even when you literally can get anything, more or less anything you want.
00:50:55.700And, and, and yet we know at any moment it can be subverted by something terrible happening.
00:51:02.960You know, at any moment you can suddenly feel like you're, you might be having a heart attack, right?
00:51:07.080And then, and then that becomes the thing that the, this sense of me in the middle of everything collapses upon, and, and it's, it is, it makes life, I mean, this, this, again, this sense of, of, of being in this vulnerable center, right?
00:51:26.520It makes life this kind of long emergency that can be pacified by, you know, increasingly strenuous efforts to control experience, right?
00:51:36.980We have to control this thing because at any moment, we're constantly, but just, if you just look at-
00:51:43.360Yeah, well, at any moment we might die.
00:51:45.020Yeah, we're avoiding death, you know, but even, you know, even for those of us who don't think about death very often, and there are those people, we're constantly modifying our experience so as to, to avoid discomfort, whether it's social discomfort or physical discomfort, or just every, every correction in our body.
00:52:06.300I mean, if you just, if you just try to sit still for an hour, you'll notice that all of the micro adjustments of, in posture that you're now no longer making are made because you really don't have to wait long before you feel miserable.
00:52:22.860I mean, your body, the amount of pain you can get just sitting in the most comfortable chair you can find in your home and just resolving not to move is, is quite extraordinary.
00:52:32.040It's just, you know, it's, it's, it's just, there's no position that's comfortable enough that it will be comfortable an hour from now.
00:52:38.820Okay. So when you, when you rise out of that into this meditative state, what, what, what's your experience and what has that done for you personally and ethically?
00:52:49.680Um, okay. So, so the starting point, which I've just dimly sketched out of, of being a subject in the head, right?
00:52:57.780I mean, this is something that, that I, I will be familiar to 99% of our audience or, you know, 99.999% of our audience.
00:53:07.000People feel that they are, they don't feel identical to their bodies.
00:53:10.500They feel like they have bodies and now, you know, they might be told, okay, you might want to look into this practice of meditation.
00:53:16.660You might want to just understand yourself a little better here.
00:53:20.720You can close your eyes and pay attention to the feeling of breathing, you know, the sensation of breathing in the, in the, you know, the rising, falling of their chest or the, the air passing in their nostrils.
00:53:31.740And every time you get lost in thought, just come back to the raw sensation of breathing.
00:53:36.280That's a very, you know, basic exercise of, you know, what's called mindfulness.
00:53:39.480And the moment you try to, try to do that, you begin to discover, or, you know, some moments down the line, you discover that it's very hard to do, that your, that your default state is to get distracted by a conversation you're having with yourself and to forget all about this project of paying attention to the present moment.
00:54:01.140And it could be, it doesn't matter what it is, but, you know, the breath in this case.
00:54:05.320And, and so it is in fact true to say that for most people, I mean, literally 99.9% of our audience, they couldn't pay attention to the breath for a full minute, say, even if their lives depended on it, right?
00:54:21.540It's just, it's simply not in the cards.
00:54:23.400It's not, it's, you know, the fate of the world could depend on it.
00:54:26.580And someone who's not really fairly well trained in this just couldn't do it.
00:54:34.580What's interesting is that despite your best efforts, you get carried away by thought helplessly moment after moment.
00:54:43.580Now, being able to break that spell, being able to see thought as thought, I mean, so eventually once you get some degree of mindfulness in hand, you no longer confine your attention to the breath or any other arbitrary object.
00:55:01.160You begin to open it up to everything you can possibly experience.
00:55:04.300So it's just, you know, sights and sounds and sensations and emotions and, and thoughts themselves can become objects of mindfulness.
00:55:13.580But when you can, but this is where, this is the kind of crucial, the crucial, you know, kind of almost binary difference, which, which produces an immense amount of psychological benefit.
00:55:27.160The moment you can really notice thoughts themselves as appearances in consciousness rather than what you are in each moment.
00:55:37.900Because what happens is in the default case, the thoughts kind of creep up from behind us in some sense.
00:55:44.340They kind of come out of nowhere and that just feels like me, right?
00:56:01.160So you're saying that you're saying, and this is part of, I suppose, part of the Buddhist tradition, particularly, although not only that being the puppet of those thoughts is part of what prolongs suffering, at least under some circumstance, especially being the puppet of them.
00:56:18.940And so, and so this is, so, but the people, you know, listening to us now can feel this.
00:56:24.700So, you know, you know, we're talking and people are trying to understand the thread of this conversation, but it's that they have a voice in their head that's competing with this, right?
00:56:34.240Then, you know, they're trying to listen to us, but they're also thinking, right?
00:56:37.400And they think, so they might think, well, what the hell is he talking about?
00:56:46.240That thought, that, that feels, if you're identified with it, if you don't see it as mere language appearing in consciousness or mere imagery, right?
00:57:06.380Well, one of the things you do in clinical work all the time, especially in the cognitive behavioral field, is you help people identify those thoughts in some sense as, as objects.
00:57:18.260To no longer identify with them and to say, you know, just because you think that, it's not necessarily true, it's not necessarily you, and it's not necessarily helpful.
00:57:46.340And I really also see that as a tremendous danger of totalitarian ideologies, because they're thought systems that are almost entirely foreign in some sense to the individual person that invade that cognitive space that you're describing and then manifest themselves as unquestioning identity.
00:58:04.820And if they're blinding the person to some underlying reality that's actually revivifying and nourishing and an antidote to suffering, then they're a tremendous block to exactly that process.
00:58:19.480So there are two levels at which we can address this problem of thought and its connection to suffering.
00:58:25.840And one is at the level of thought itself, right?
00:58:29.100So you can replace bad thoughts with better thoughts, right?
00:58:32.140And you can get some – you can triangulate on your tendency to have one kind of conversation with yourself and engineer a better conversation with yourself, right?
00:58:41.560And that's – yes, in cognitive behavioral therapies.
00:58:43.540Yeah, you can stop thinking like a six-year-old, for example, and start thinking like a 30-year-old.
00:59:00.680So that's a totally legitimate way to climb out of the great hole of suffering that people find themselves in.
00:59:12.040But there's a more fundamental – and I'm not saying – what I'm recommending in terms of meditation and mindfulness here is more fundamental, but it is not – it's completely compatible with that more conceptual, discursive layer, right?
00:59:29.300And some things – I would argue some things are best addressed on the discursive layer, and some things are better addressed on the more fundamental layer of mindfulness.
00:59:38.780Well, you know, when you're sitting meditating, first of all, you're sitting, and so it's perfectly reasonable to adopt a mode of thought that's healthful and productive in relationship to the fact that you're sitting.
00:59:50.580You know, those more discursive propositional thoughts that we've been describing, they're higher resolution in some sense, and they're more practically implementable.
00:59:59.860And so there's going – you want to get that in order, but that doesn't mean that this phenomenon that you're describing that's outside the entire discursive structure doesn't exist.
01:00:10.340It's probably also the place we go, at least to some degree, when we go to sleep and we dream and get revivified.
01:00:15.880It's outside that discursive landscape, and that's necessary for physiological rejuvenation.
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01:01:28.960Yeah, well, dreams are very interesting because I think they are necessary, and we know a lot about the necessity of REM sleep for health.
01:01:39.080And so there's no question that dreams are doing good things for us, but they also are an experience of stark psychosis.
01:01:48.400You know, I mean, they are a condition, unless we're talking about lucid dreaming, this is a circumstance where you really have no idea what's going on.
01:01:56.500I mean, you are, you are in reality asleep in your bed, and yet you have transitioned into another experience, which where the laws of nature are violated, you're talking to dead people, you're, you know, the sky's the limit, right?
01:02:09.940And you're not even surprised, you're doing so little reality testing, you're not even surprised about these changes.
01:02:16.420You have so little purchase on who you were just 15 minutes ago when you went to sleep, that it's, I mean, it does mean, it does mean to some degree at that point, though, that you have suspended your unthinking identification with your daytime propositional thought.
01:02:31.440Yeah, but in the normal case, you're identified with your dream body and your dream persona, and whoever you've become, I mean, you're being terrorized in a more malleable, labile circumstance.
01:02:45.360Right, the identity problem is still there.
01:02:46.760It's just, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's more random and less logically coherent.
01:02:52.520There's something there about exploration and change of categories themselves that's going on.
01:02:57.760But I can see your point about it still being part of that.
01:03:01.380And more to the point, there's actually a very close connection between what happens with ordinary thought and dreaming.
01:03:08.700So, for instance, I mean, ordinary thinking is, in my view, ordinary identification with thought.
01:03:18.780I'm not, I don't mean to demonize thought per se, because we need thoughts.
01:03:22.500And the goal of meditation is not to get rid of thoughts, it's to be able to recognize them as what they are and to recognize the process of thinking.
01:03:31.380And to break this, this, this pseudo identification with it.
01:03:34.560But the identification with thought is very much analogous to dreaming and not knowing that you're dreaming.
01:03:40.500And the switch from a normal dream to a lucid dream is analogous to the kind of waking up in the middle of life that I'm, I'm advocating here, where you can actually just recognize thoughts as thoughts.
01:03:52.560And there's something that the way in which thoughts steal over us, where it's like you're trying to pay attention to something.
01:04:00.560And then all of a sudden, you're replaying an argument that you had with your wife, you know, yesterday, right?
01:04:07.320And helplessly, and it's actually, it's dredging up the emotion that is appropriate to that argument, right?
01:04:14.720So, now you're getting angry or regretful or whatever it is.
01:04:23.460I mean, this is the default state of most people most of the time.
01:04:26.060But given how unhappy the character of our conversation is with ourselves most of the time, given that the stories we're telling ourselves are less than perfectly inspiring and perfectly ennobling and, you know, great, you know, opening us to great reservoirs of compassion and wisdom, right?
01:04:50.940And it is, it does have this dreamlike character of both coming out of nowhere and seizing, completely seizing the reins of attention and identity and taking us elsewhere.
01:05:09.320That's part of the totalitarian spirit of rationality, that proclivity.
01:05:13.660Well, but it is, but a lot of these thoughts aren't rational.
01:05:16.860It's just, it's just, you're just rehearsing your experience.
01:05:20.020It's just like, I mean, you'll tell yourself the same thing 10 times in a row, and never, and you won't be bored on the 10th time.
01:05:26.100You'll, you'll, like, if you just imagine what it would be like to externalize your thoughts on a loudspeaker for everyone to listen to, you know, and you were just, you just, it was just helplessly, you know, externalized.
01:05:38.420Every, every normal person would sound insane, you know, because, because of the, the perseveration and the, and the, just the redundancy and the, and the strange structure to the discursiveness.
01:05:53.660I mean, this is, this is a, you know, this is ever present.
01:05:58.800It's, it's so, it's so ever present that it strike, it doesn't strike people as strange, but to, to be presuming, we, we have a, we have a dialogue with ourselves as though the eye could talk to the me, and that made any sense at all.
01:06:13.680It's like, you know, I'm sitting here, and you're getting set up for this interview, right, and I, I'll think, oh, I got to get some water, right?
01:06:24.740Now, I know, if I'm the one to say it, and I'm the one to hear it, I know I need water, who am I telling?
01:06:33.540It's like, it's like I'm telling someone else, right, who needs to be informed about this.
01:06:37.040Well, you're, you're probably telling the prefrontal cortex, and it tells the motor cortex, so, you know, it's, that's probably the hypothalamus talking to the prefrontal cortex, because it doesn't have direct output over the motor cortex, something like that.
01:06:51.460Oh, well, yeah, it remains to be seen whether any of that is actually functionally necessary, but I, I think for the most part, it's not.
01:06:59.160I mean, for the most part, we, we simply talk to, it's almost like we started talking to our parents, you know, once we, once we had, once, you know,
01:07:06.500language is incredibly useful, as you know, and it's, it is what defines us as, as people in many respects, and once it get to, it's like once it gets tuned up, it never shuts off, and, you know, we're talking to, so, you know, first we're pre-linguistic, and we're just drinking in language that's aimed at us, you know, all the time.
01:07:27.200Our parents are jabbering to us, we begin to understand what they're saying, as so much of it is, you know, indexical, they're pointing to things, and we're naming those things, we're hearing the, the words, the sounds associated with those, the things that are being grasped and handed to us.
01:07:41.660And, and soon we begin to participate in this language game in, in ways that we're not conscious of, and once this gets tuned up, we talk to our parents, we jabber to our parents incessantly, and then we jabber to ourselves when they leave the room, and it never stops.
01:07:58.460Well, you know, Ian McGilchrist and I have talked about this issue, and he's of the opinion, I hope I'm not misrepresenting him, and it's an idea that I had shared to some degree, is that the right hemisphere, in many ways, this is in left-handed people, at least, in some sense is more regulated by the underlying limbic structures, the motivational structures, like an animal is.
01:08:28.780And, and the left hemisphere, to the degree that it's linguistic, it inhibits those right hemisphere functions tonically, and that's likely the speech.
01:08:38.900And what that means, implies, perhaps, is that if you can shut that speech off, there's a different mode of perception that's characterized by the right hemisphere's immersement in these underlying motivational systems, that might be part and parcel of that revivification possibility, that you're, I think you're pointing to, as something that lies outside the linguistic landscape.
01:09:04.260And that can become maybe hyper-dominant, has become hyper-dominant in us, because we're so immersed in language.
01:09:11.020I mean, from what I can tell, I mean, thus far, the research on, the neuroimaging research on meditation is, you know, still in its infancy, despite the fact that there have been hundreds and even thousands of papers at this point on meditation.
01:09:24.600But, you know, silencing the default mode network is certainly part of the footprint of the change here that is relevant.
01:09:34.980And the default mode network, for people, I mean, many people have heard of this by now, but it used to be kind of an esoteric topic.
01:09:42.220But just a brief review, the default mode network is called the default mode because it was noticed in virtually every neuroimaging experiment ever designed that there was this system of structures in the midline of the brain that would increase their activity in between tasks.
01:10:02.120So whatever the paradigm was, if you're giving people a reading task or a sensory task or a memory task or visual discrimination, whatever it is, you're putting them in the scanner, they have to pay attention to something.
01:10:12.960In those epochs between tasks, when they were no longer having to pay attention to something, they're waiting for the next thing to be presented to them.
01:10:20.000So these set of structures in the midline would increase their activity.
01:10:24.620And so it was called the default mode.
01:10:27.080It's just the kind of the brain's idling state.
01:10:30.060But these are also the structures that seem to have a disproportionate amount of responsibility for self-reference and self-representation.
01:10:40.740And they get tuned up even further when you give people tasks that require a retrospective analysis of the self.
01:10:50.540You know, if I gave you a list of words and I was saying, and I asked you to decide, you know, which of these words apply to you and which of these words don't apply to you as a person, right?
01:10:59.880That's the kind of task that would increase, you know, above baseline activity in the default mode network.
01:11:06.020And there are other components to this, you know, even such as questions of identity.
01:11:12.640I mean, a lot of that is in whole or in part mediated by the default mode.
01:11:19.740And this is what becomes noticeably quiescent when you are successfully practicing mindfulness.
01:11:26.040And it becomes quiescent in those experiences with psychedelics where this sense of self is transcended for a time.
01:11:34.800Now where linguistic communication often becomes extremely difficult.
01:11:41.480But so what's interesting here is that, you know, I think people, you know, ordinary people who do not take psychedelics and have no interest in meditation do experience interruptions in this sense of self a lot that just go unrecognized.
01:11:58.180And sometimes they go recognized because they're so-called peak experiences or, you know, flow experiences where, you know, even the kinds of experiences you referenced, you know, looking up at the Milky Way, you know, the most beautiful encounter with a starry night you have, you know, in that decade, say.
01:12:20.200You've gone to the place where there's the least light pollution and you've got, you know, a cloudless, moonless night and then you point your gaze skyward and you get the full experience.
01:12:32.200That's, you know, there are two experiences people tend to have when they have sought out a peak experience like that.
01:12:39.060But if they're lucky, they really have something like a moment where they're lifted out of themselves and they can just have something like this breathtaking encounter with nature, right?
01:12:51.960And then all too often that lasts, you know, a second and a half and then they're just talking about it and thinking about it and trying to get back to it.
01:13:02.600But they're still just jabbering to themselves and to, you know, whoever's with them very likely trying to get a hold of this thing where if you took mushrooms or if you took acid in that circumstance,
01:13:14.820well, then your linguistic, you know, efforts to get this thing in hand are completely blown over and you have the full, you know, multi-hour encounter with the thing itself, right?
01:13:28.840And it's, you know, that's what's so amazing about psychedelics is that whoever you are, I mean, let's leave aside the prospect of having a bad trip, which we, you know, about which many interesting things can be said.
01:13:39.760But the so-called good trip you can have on mushrooms or LSD is this condition of the data of your senses and in particular, in a circumstance like the one you described,
01:13:54.280your engagement with the natural world becomes so vivid, so salient that the boundary between self and world is completely overcome, right?
01:14:06.160So like, and the energetics of all of that suddenly becomes very salient.
01:14:10.320So it's not just like you're no longer representing yourself.
01:14:14.200Also the consequences, you know, you know Griffith's work and if someone has a mystical experience on psilocybin and they're smokers, they stop 75% of the time.
01:14:40.220And nonetheless, going there apparently has this transformative capacity.
01:14:46.520You also see the same thing with treatment for alcoholics.
01:14:49.520You know, I mean, for years alcohol researchers have known that the only reliable treatment for alcoholism is spiritual transformation.
01:14:56.560And that's hard, those empirical researchers have been wrestling with that for a long time.
01:15:01.820Well, it gives you the sense that, you know, again, I'm not claiming that the beatific vision that one has on LSD or psilocybin is necessarily the true target state of one's spiritual life.
01:15:18.440I mean, you know, in some ways I think it's not – there's something misleading about it.
01:15:24.060But at a minimum, this end of the continuum of positive experience, you know, just being flooded with bliss and completely overcome with an encounter with the present moment.
01:15:38.100And meaning, you know, just the perception of meaning, whether that meaning can be rationally justified in the end, right?
01:15:44.140Because literally you can – if you're in the right state of mind, it doesn't matter what you're looking at.
01:15:50.080You can just be staring at a, you know, a puddle in the concrete in a parking lot and all of a sudden that is the, you know, the answer to the mystery of existence, right?
01:15:59.240So in some ways it's potentially – there's a place to stand where you can pathologize this, you know, this hierophony of meaning.
01:16:09.040But, you know, leaving that criticism aside, the experience itself proves beyond any possibility of doubt that it's possible to have an utterly transforming, transformative, and totally satisfying encounter with the present moment that isn't itself dependent on anything happening.
01:17:17.220So she's been through a variety of forms of hell and has come out the other side and has changed in consequence of that.
01:17:24.680And one of the things she started doing, as well as doing your meditation course, was using the rosary.
01:17:31.200So I asked her today – she's also been talking to Jonathan Paggio, who's an extraordinarily interesting religious thinker who carves icons.
01:17:40.520He's a former French-Canadian young guy.
01:17:42.440He's a very, very deep person in my estimation.
01:17:45.920In any case, she's been praying the rosary.
01:17:47.880And I said, okay, so, well, you do that and you listen to Sam's meditations.
01:18:49.580And while she says the words, well, we've talked a lot about what these words mean.
01:18:54.680And so in reference to the Starry Night, for example, there's this series of Renaissance paintings, which are quite magnificent, that show an image of Mary with her – with 12 stars around her head and with her foot on a serpent.
01:19:09.580And that's – that's an allusion to the Garden of Eden because – well, Eve crushes the serpent beneath her foot.
01:19:16.580And so – and this is relevant to your discussion and our discussion earlier about the deepest of all evils, right?
01:19:52.860And while she does that before she listens to your meditation.
01:19:56.300But that's where I see the psychological link, let's say, because you want to put your psyche in the highest possible place, whatever that is.
01:20:06.680And we don't know what it is exactly, but it's something like what happens when you look up at the night sky.
01:20:32.240And there's no – and my – and the juxtaposition of doing the rosary with doing, you know, what I'm recommending in the app is not as odd as you might think it is in my view.
01:20:47.920I mean, I have – you know, it's – there's so much of – there's so much resonance between what I think is true and the kinds of things Jesus said, right?
01:21:04.180My issue with organized religion, every organized religion, is just that clearly what we're really talking about are deeper universal truths about the nature of mind, right?
01:21:19.560You know, whether we limit it to human minds or just mind itself, consciousness itself.
01:21:25.020And so there's no culture, there's no religion, there's no provincial cult that has the full story and what we really – really the burden on us in every present generation, you know, but certainly now in the 21st century where there are all the barriers to –
01:21:51.840Yeah, all the barriers to – you know, getting information and translating from other languages, all of that's broken down.
01:21:57.340We have access to everyone's ideas, right?
01:21:59.620There have been 100 billion people and a bunch of them have had good ideas, a bunch of them have had bad ideas, and we have access to thousands of years of human conversation.
01:22:10.880Yeah, so maybe we can start out what those ideas were.
01:22:13.600My only argument is that we should only care about using the best ideas, and we should – and we no longer have the right to any deep, serious sectarianism, right?
01:22:28.640Now, we can be – that's not to say that you can't be especially taken with Jesus and the tradition that has grown up around him.
01:22:35.460And, you know, you're not – you're kind of bored with Socrates, and so you don't spend as much time with him, and that's all fine.
01:22:41.940But the problem I've had traditionally with organized religion is religion historically is the only corner of culture where people begin saying to themselves and to their children, we're playing a totally different game over here.
01:22:59.940This is not just – this is not a matter of just ideas and human beings and human conversations and ordinary books.
01:23:15.720Well, I think it seems to me that laying – the danger in that – I'm not disagreeing with you.
01:23:20.960But it seems to me the danger in that is that it actually minimizes the problem of atrocity that's associated with sectarianism because – and perhaps you're not –
01:24:03.420It's been many – now several decades since I actually read the book.
01:24:07.200Well, the remarkable thing about that story is Christ comes back to earth and he does some miracles.
01:24:13.380And it's the church himself that puts him in jail and then the head of the church comes to the jail and says, what the hell are you doing back here?
01:24:39.200And, you know, Dostoevsky was writing at the same time as Nietzsche and had quite an influence on Nietzsche as it turned out.
01:24:45.220And – but because Dostoevsky was writing fiction, he could go places that Dostoevsky couldn't go as a philosopher.
01:24:53.000And one of the things he was trying to point out was that despite the proclivity to totalitarianism that you can lay at the feet of sectarian religion, the doors left open.
01:25:06.680And, you know, all of us have to come to terms with the fact that our institutions, religious and otherwise, tend to ossify into these totalitarian structures that are analogous socially, I think, in some ways, to the default network that you just described.
01:25:22.020They're trying to point to something beyond that.
01:25:25.580But, you know, they degenerate and ossify.
01:25:28.640And then – but then we have to go underneath that, too, if we're going to get our criticisms right.
01:25:33.380Because as terrified as it's reasonable to be about religious sectarianism and totalitarianism, it's also necessary to remember that chimpanzees go on raiding parties and kill the neighboring tribe, so to speak.
01:25:49.100And they're not motivated by religious concerns.
01:25:51.480And so to put that at the feet of religion, even implicitly, I think, is – I understand why that's an impulse.
01:26:02.080But it doesn't face the problem deeply enough.
01:26:06.080And it also obscures a potential solution, I think, because it tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
01:26:13.060And I know you're trying to regain the baby.
01:26:14.740Yeah, no, I'm trying to save the baby.
01:26:18.000Yeah, I mean, for me, the crucial variables that make religion itself so problematic are, one, the religions – and this is true of the Abrahamic ones in particular – the religions that are focused on a text, right, that can't be edited.
01:26:40.320Now, religious moderates and religious liberals will disagree with me and they'll say that the whole tradition is a matter of reinterpreting and grappling with the contradictions and the – and that's all a very rich discourse and blah, blah, blah.
01:26:59.100But the real problem is the books themselves betray their merely human origin on almost every page.
01:27:08.760You know, there's just like – it's true of the plays of Shakespeare.
01:27:12.900It's true of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
01:27:19.280And it's true of the Bible, right, in all its parts, right?
01:27:23.220So there's just – there's – and, you know, if you just imagine how good a book would be, could be, if it were truly written or dictated by an omniscient being, I mean, it's just – it's trivially easy to imagine that it would be so much better than they in fact are.
01:27:45.540It's really not that easy to translate the sorts of experiences that you're pointing to into words in a reliable manner, right?
01:27:53.220No, but it's – but you can do it better and worse.
01:27:55.900Well, but even – okay, okay, let's talk about that for a minute, better and worse, because that's really – and I want to tie this back to your comments about navigation earlier.
01:28:05.500So, you know, we do have – and this is perhaps an issue of definition.
01:28:10.420We're getting the definition straight again here.
01:28:11.880We do have the sense that some texts are deeper than others, and I don't think it's reasonable to disagree about that.
01:28:21.220You can read a shallow story, you think, well, you know, that was shallow, and you can read a deep story, and you think that was deep, but you don't know exactly what you mean by shallow or deep.
01:28:31.880Let me just add one footnote here, which is somewhat confounding.
01:28:36.220And it goes to what we were just saying about psychedelics.
01:28:39.040It's possible for you to be bringing the depth to a text or to a circumstance or to a puddle in a parking lot that isn't necessarily there, right?
01:28:50.460So, like, this is where it gets confusing.
01:28:53.640Yeah, like, literally, you know, if you're going to connect all the dots, you know, you can – I mean, this is something I did in the end of faith as a parlor trick,
01:29:03.220just because I wanted to prove this point, is that I literally walked into a bookstore and went to the cookbook aisle of the bookstore and randomly chose a cookbook and opened it up at random and just dictated – just wrote down the recipe and then created a mystical text on the basis of that recipe.
01:29:21.160I just showed that this recipe, which it was for some Hawaiian cookbook, was like wok seared fish and shrimp cakes or something.
01:29:29.480And I took the ingredients in that recipe and wove a completely confabulatory mystical text out of those ingredients.
01:29:38.940Now, that was something I was bringing to the text.
01:29:41.200There was no author creating that document.
01:29:47.900And the truth is, people can always do that, right?
01:29:50.200So that's – it's very hard to keep score here and to be rigorous.
01:29:55.660All we can do is, again and again, have this experience of you say something that on your own side purports to be meaningful and intends to be meaningful,
01:30:07.240and you're trying to convey something.
01:30:08.580And then I and other people seem to grasp what you're communicating, and we have this intersubjective convergence, which is increasingly satisfying.
01:30:20.080And yes, so – but I do take your point that there – Dostoevsky was writing – you know, the Brothers Karamazov is a deeply interesting, meaningful document.
01:30:28.720Okay, so let's take that argument apart, because you put your finger on the postmodern quandary, right?
01:30:37.140Because the postmodernists, in some sense, the reason that they ran into trouble with assuming –
01:30:45.320they criticized the notion that there was a canonical interpretation of a text, because there's so many subjective interpretations of any text.
01:30:52.740In fact, there's a near infinite number of potential subjective interpretations of any text, just like there's almost an infinite number of places you could be looking right now.
01:31:06.380So – and when you say that you can project something onto the text that in some sense isn't there, that's also an extremely deep problem.
01:31:14.860And these problems are deep enough, you know, the fact of multiple interpretations of a single reality is so pervasive
01:31:21.240that it's stopped AI researchers – it's the thing that stopped AI researchers from being able to build functional robots.
01:34:02.240So, and the reason I'm trying to get this clear with you is because you think clearly about these things,
01:34:09.060but also because it allows for clarification of language in some sense.
01:34:15.580So we could say that as you go deeper into that nested structure,
01:34:20.980what you approach becomes more and more sacred by definition.
01:34:25.860I'm trying to define it experientially because the, so let's say you're transformed at a fundamental level.
01:34:35.240That means something shifts way down deep and that's how you feel it, even in an embodied sense.
01:34:41.760And, and what we've defined as, as human beings, as religious, as far as I can tell, or as sacred is our attempt to define the landscape that is characterized by those deepest structures of maps.
01:34:57.840Now, what you're talking about, I think is outside the map system altogether, in some sense, you know, it's the container for all of it.
01:35:05.860And, yeah, yeah, it is in some sense, because, or it's, it's orthogonal to it.
01:35:14.080I mean, it penetrates it at every point, but it's not reducible to it.
01:35:18.820And I mean, that's why it's so consequential.
01:35:22.060So, for instance, I think you can, I mean, so taking, accepting your, your picture of nested maps and, and depth and all that, I mean, I agree with all of that.
01:35:34.800And maps can be more or less useful and more or less in register with, with the, the reality they're purporting to describe, right?
01:35:51.900Yeah, and we have a language game, which is, when it's working, is optimized to, you know, as, as Richard Feynman famously said, not fooling ourselves, right?
01:36:01.860I mean, that's like the master value of not fooling yourself.
01:36:03.920Whereas I would argue, in, in religious discourse, not fooling yourself is not a master value.
01:36:10.680And in fact, you know, so much of what goes by the name of religious faith-
01:36:14.180Okay, but let, let me progress on terminology then, because you talk about the sacred.
01:36:19.520And, and, and you accept that and, and you also, and you also see it as revivifying and, and, and, and crucial to the prevention of suffering.
01:36:39.000Well, so maybe the best way to get at it is by reference to a principle, which is, I think what, I think anything that's true, right?
01:36:49.560And this is, this is true scientifically, descriptively, but it's true spiritually, and it's true with respect to anything we would call sacred.
01:36:55.980Anything that's true, anything that's real is discoverable now.
01:37:02.820It's like a little, like, like if we, if we lost everything, if we lost all the books, if we lost all the tools, if we lost everything, and we just found ourselves having to reboot, not only civilization, but human cognition, you know, everything that is real is discoverable from that starting point.
01:37:23.920Even if you're, even if you're starting at zero again, now we would, we would talk about it differently.
01:37:28.240We would have, you know, we would, we would have memories of what, what, you know, some of us would have memories of all that we'd lost, and that would anchor us to certain expectations.
01:38:02.720First, I'm not saying, let me just close the door to a possible misunderstanding.
01:38:06.480I'm not saying that we shouldn't stand on the shoulders of giants.
01:38:10.660And I'm not saying tradition is useless.
01:38:12.980In fact, you know, I would, I would probably agree with you that, that we should be fairly conservative in how we, in how we overthrow our traditions.
01:38:22.120I mean, so I'm not, I'm not arguing that we should just be radical iconoclasts that tears, we should tear everything down to the studs and start again.
01:38:29.300That's not, that's not what I'm advocating.
01:38:30.800Well, what's the difference, what's the difference in your vision then between the tradition that you would be conservative about and religion?
01:38:40.940I'm just trying to see how you're making the distinction conceptually.
01:38:43.700It comes down to very specific claims that, that I think are clearly false and which many of our religions advertise as not only important, but indispensable for their projects.
01:38:57.460So let me take Islam as a specific example.
01:39:03.040I mean, Islam, mainstream Islam, not just Al-Qaeda style Islam, just any Islam that really is worthy of the name in the year 2021 is founded on the claim that the Quran is the literal word of God.
01:39:18.800Yeah, the question is, what does literal mean?
01:39:23.300Yeah, but in the minds of most Muslims, most of the time, it means that these stanzas were dictated to Muhammad in his cave by the archangel Gabriel.
01:39:35.500And he was commanded to recite, and he recited them.
01:39:39.980And what we have here is, in truth, the claim, the orthodox claim is even more stringent than the seemingly analogous, you know, fundamentalist, you know, Christian claim about the Bible.
01:39:53.920It's not just that the text itself is verbatim what God said, it's that the document itself is, in fact, like, every instantiation of the physical document is itself the word of God.
01:40:13.240It's like, it's, there's sort of a double layer of sacredness to it, and it cannot be edited.
01:40:19.300Okay, is the problem that claim, or is it the problem that the people who purport to understand it claim to be 100% right?
01:40:27.900No, no, but the problem is, is that given that claim, and given the actual contents of the book, what you have is an endless source of divisiveness and conflict.
01:40:44.160Like, if you dignify that claim, you say, okay, this is the most important series of utterances ever expressed on earth, this is it.
01:40:53.940Let's find out what the creator of the universe wants us to know.
01:40:57.420What he wants us to know, above all else, is that, one, we should hate and fear and despise and resist and never befriend unbelievers.
01:41:09.580Right, that's, that's, that message comes through on virtually every page, and a hell has been prepared for these unbelievers, where their skins will be endlessly burned off of them, and replenished so that they can be tortured anew, right?
01:41:23.540Do you think there's any relationship between that claim and your observation that failure to take refuge in the sacred, as you've laid it out, dooms you to possession by the default network and puts you into that hell?
01:41:40.180Yes, okay, so it is possible to give a very enlightened reading of this text, or really any text, that allows you to step out of its divisive and toxic implications.
01:41:55.580So I would support that kind of reading, you know, if we were joined in this conversation by Muslim scholars, who said, no, no, don't you understand, Jordan's spiritual interpretation of this admonishment is precisely what God intended.
01:42:14.980He intended it to be, he intended it to be, to be an engine not of hate and division and sectarian tribalism, he intended it to be a device that would allow you to recognize the, the emotional and cognitive implications of, of, of being caught by dualism, say, right?
01:42:36.900Like really, you know, etc, etc, etc. He goes as far as you want in that direction, that'd be great. The problem is, the book itself gives no indication that your interpretation is the right one. In fact, it gives every indication that it's not, and that it's heterodox.
01:42:52.920Well, I'm going to be speaking with a sequence of Muslim scholars.
01:42:55.500Okay, good luck. I wish you good luck there.
01:42:58.680Well, I, I, I, I praying for good luck, because it's an, it's a conversation that absolutely needs to be had.
01:43:10.220Yeah, so I just, to close, just to finally close this chapter, I would just say that it's, it's not that what you're doing with the book isn't possible.
01:43:18.420My concern is that these book, these books tend to make that very difficult. And there are other more plausible and easier interpretations that require less hermeneutics, less cognitive bandwidth, less, less principles of charity, and less cosmopolitanism.
01:43:38.100And, and so therefore, it's no accident that you, you wind up with something like the Islamic State, if you take the Quran very, very seriously. And that's, that's what worries me as we, as we live in this world where it's increasingly easy for small numbers of people to screw up the whole project for millions of us.
01:43:58.060You know, as, you know, as, as technology, you know, leverages the consequence of tribalism.
01:44:02.380Yes, well, that's why I've been focusing on development of the individual, you know, because it is increasingly possible for individuals to do that. So we have to stop doing it.
01:44:12.560Look, I would love to keep talking to you. I want to ask you one more, I'm getting tired, and that's why I'm just talking, because I'm going to get fuzzy minded.
01:44:20.020One, first, maybe we should do another event.
01:44:27.420Second, this idea you had about escaping from the text, let's say, and returning to existential first principles or phenomenological first principles.
01:44:36.920The only objection I can see to that is that if you lose, you can't derive the way of producing a social organization directly from the existential experience.
01:44:52.400And so that's a, right, because you think, look, partly we're going to derive our sacred values from this level, this strata of experience that you described.
01:45:01.520But there's also an element, there's also the fact that we derive our values from collective agreement, right?
01:45:10.160And maybe we feed the collective agreement with the sacred experience.
01:45:14.600But then if we lose that collective tradition, it's very difficult to rebuild that from first principles.
01:45:21.940And I would say, just to clear up any confusion on this point, I'm not suggesting that meditation or even the deepest insights you can have through meditation or psychedelics is sufficient for everything, for us to get everything we want out of life, right?
01:45:42.120It's like, I think, I think its proper use is, as you describe, is seeding every other ordinary moment in life with this capacity to refresh the mind and an allowance.
01:46:05.100Just, it is the thing that equips us to actually be loving and unconflicted and relaxed in the present moment, whatever's going on.
01:46:15.520But when you ask the question, what should we do to build a viable global civilization, there's so many other modes of conversation and knowledge gathering and reliance upon institutions and tradition that is necessary.
01:46:31.780You know, I'm not imagining some beautiful state of nature where we have lost all of the structure that we've built up over thousands of years and we just meditate as yogis and then try to figure out, then try to call someone when our internet goes down, right?
01:46:49.580There's a tremendous amount of knowledge that we need to do anything well at this point, you know, as we've just witnessed in, you know, getting through, you know, now we're into our second year of a global pandemic, right?
01:47:14.980And meditation and, you know, psilocybin and a full speed collision with the beauty and profundity of the present moment isn't the answer to many of those questions.
01:47:27.320It's just, it is just, it's the answer to many other things.