Episode 165: Life With No Head (With Sam Harris)

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad and psychologist, David Pizarro, having

[00:00:06] an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics.

[00:00:09] Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and

[00:00:13] knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:21] Our father.

[00:00:24] Which heart did happen?

[00:00:28] Let him...fucking...stay there.

[00:00:38] The Queen of Brains and U.S.

[00:01:05] Anybody can have a brain?

[00:01:15] Very good man.

[00:01:20] Just a very bad wizard.

[00:01:22] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:26] Dave, apparently if you haven't seen the movie Booksmart yet, then you hate women.

[00:01:31] Have you seen the movie Booksmart yet?

[00:01:34] Damn it, this is a trick question.

[00:01:37] No, but that means a lot of people hate women, doesn't it?

[00:01:42] Like most people hate women.

[00:01:44] Have you read your colleague, Kate Mann, the logic of misogyny to...

[00:01:48] She doesn't think it's hatred.

[00:01:51] Yeah, no.

[00:01:52] I feel like this is one of those cases where all of the factors that you'd want

[00:02:03] to be in place for a movie to be a hit weren't, and one of those might be that it's a woman, but...

[00:02:07] Come on.

[00:02:08] Right?

[00:02:09] So I actually think I get excused from this category of...

[00:02:15] Wait, have you seen it?

[00:02:17] No.

[00:02:18] But I have two reasons why that doesn't mean I hate women.

[00:02:22] First, I have a daughter.

[00:02:24] No.

[00:02:25] There's a father who has a daughter.

[00:02:27] How can I hate women?

[00:02:28] I have a daughter.

[00:02:29] The first is that I also haven't seen the Avengers movies and John Wick and the Guy movies.

[00:02:38] So you hate men also?

[00:02:40] So yes, if anything...

[00:02:42] You're just misanthropic.

[00:02:44] Yeah, so I haven't seen any of those movies, so me not seeing that.

[00:02:48] I do think it's a kind of movie that would really annoy me, and my daughter saw it, and she was actually a little annoyed by it, and she said I would definitely be annoyed by it.

[00:02:58] You know, I don't know anything about the movie, but there is a...

[00:03:05] In the latest Avengers, there's a particular scene where all of the...

[00:03:10] I'll say this without too many spoilers, but all of the female superheroes get together to engage in a particular task during a battle.

[00:03:17] I heard about that.

[00:03:18] Yeah.

[00:03:19] And man, that scene divided a bunch of people, but even I think in the podcast with Women I Respect, they were cringing.

[00:03:27] And it really is like a little bit like, oh wow.

[00:03:31] It should just be...

[00:03:32] I love it when movies just as an aside, there happens to be a black character or there are just happened to be a lot of positive, powerful female characters.

[00:03:42] But when you can feel the intentionality of...

[00:03:48] It just takes you out of the movie.

[00:03:50] It's like a kind of pandering that undercuts the emotion that you're trying to inspire.

[00:04:00] Yeah, yeah.

[00:04:02] It does.

[00:04:04] Now I wonder if that's true, were there some women that were like, yeah, like fuck yeah, women rule.

[00:04:10] So I saw it with my daughter and she did like that scene.

[00:04:15] And so I feel like I'm willing to put up with it if sort of the younger minds who are less cynical than us don't notice it.

[00:04:23] Like my daughter's not a film critic like your daughter is.

[00:04:27] So she just enjoyed it.

[00:04:28] And if there are some young boys, especially who saw that and it worked, then fine.

[00:04:33] I just think that as a director, I would try a little bit to not...

[00:04:40] Anyway, so we have Sam Harris on the show today coming up in the second segment for a long discussion.

[00:04:47] So we're going to keep this short.

[00:04:49] Oh, back to Booksmart for a second.

[00:04:52] They say it's like super bad for women.

[00:04:56] Well, I'm not opposed to watching it though.

[00:04:58] You better.

[00:05:00] Because right now you hate women.

[00:05:03] I think that the female Ghostbusters movie was a better litmus test, you know?

[00:05:07] That was really about misogyny.

[00:05:10] The all female Ghostbusters.

[00:05:12] Were you one of the people that were like sending death threats to the people who made it, ruining your childhood?

[00:05:19] No, no, I was sending death threats to the people who said it wasn't a good movie.

[00:05:22] Oh yeah, because you saw it.

[00:05:24] Because I actually didn't see it.

[00:05:27] No, no.

[00:05:29] I don't think I know a single person who saw the Ghostbusters movie.

[00:05:32] You know, the bar is high to please most people now.

[00:05:36] And maybe we should take it as progress that conversations at this level are going on

[00:05:42] and not conversations at the level of should women have abortions or...

[00:05:45] Oh wait.

[00:05:47] We've now become like a Vox podcast.

[00:05:51] Alright, shall we clear our minds and make fun of an article?

[00:05:58] Yes.

[00:06:00] So we have Sam Harris coming on to talk about meditation, the self, Dave's existential unease,

[00:06:07] the idea of having no head which I find like illuminating.

[00:06:11] I had no head all through high school.

[00:06:13] Oh wait.

[00:06:21] But before then you, we wanted to do a very quick opening segment and so we went to Neuroskeptic.

[00:06:28] Wait, was this a Neuroskeptic tweet?

[00:06:30] Oh well.

[00:06:32] I don't know if he's...

[00:06:34] Yeah actually what you texted me wasn't but he originally linked to it.

[00:06:39] It's actually from 2015 this paper.

[00:06:42] But yet timeless.

[00:06:45] But timeless.

[00:06:47] Is it ethical to heal a young white elephant from his physiological autism?

[00:06:53] The title by Otto Rosler, Coney Theos, Juergen Heider, Werner Fleischer and anonymous student.

[00:07:04] The most important byline of all anonymous student.

[00:07:08] Could anyone?

[00:07:10] So can you describe the paper?

[00:07:13] I will try my best but I want to point out that if you click on it we'll put a link to this in show notes.

[00:07:22] So this paper is so rambly and weird that I don't know that I could summarize it without, you know, the map is the territory in this sense.

[00:07:31] Like to summarize it I'd have to actually read the whole thing because it goes in and out of sense making.

[00:07:37] But it proposes, this is the weirdest thing.

[00:07:42] Proposing that all animals are autistic, actually autistic.

[00:07:49] So there's this view apparently that all animals are autistic and that this is the state of nature.

[00:07:57] And that human evolution through some weird accident made us non-autistic.

[00:08:03] And what this means is that we can have a kind of moment of what's the word of personogenesis that we can have that comes from interacting with other human beings, especially caretakers where you sort of realize that they are bonding with you through their positive feedback.

[00:08:25] In this case specifically the positive feedback of a smile.

[00:08:29] And there's even a case study in here that some kid when he was seven got this kind of feedback from his mother, this some kid who didn't know to smile.

[00:08:42] He was smile blind and for them smiles are an important way in which you can get this positive feedback.

[00:08:48] But at some point he was drawing something and his mother laughed and he spontaneously got cured of his autism from this laughter that his mother was giving him.

[00:08:58] And so then it moves on to elephant toddlers and says that maybe we can apply this idea of bonding with humans through this moment of laughter.

[00:09:16] And there might be this very serious implication that is if we do this to elephant toddlers, we might turn them into persons.

[00:09:23] Well and specifically persons who can speak, who can talk.

[00:09:28] Yeah well that's the fear they would start developing language.

[00:09:32] I don't know and you know, do we want our elephants talking to us?

[00:09:37] I mean it's not something I've thought about.

[00:09:40] I have to go back to my babar books.

[00:09:45] Yeah, so I mean that's why this is a real Pandora's box that we might be opening all of a sudden there is this species of talking elephant.

[00:09:56] And you know they're big, they probably have a totally completely justified grudge against us.

[00:10:03] Yeah, as evidenced by some of their behavior when they get mad at us for sure.

[00:10:08] And if they can communicate with each other and be like hey these motherfuckers killed my mom to steal her tusks.

[00:10:15] I mean if an elephant killed me I would totally be fine.

[00:10:19] Like I would think that's completely the elephant's right to do it.

[00:10:24] And you're...

[00:10:25] That is probably how I would want to die for it.

[00:10:30] And from an honor culture you're like well I am responsible for that to all human beings.

[00:10:35] Exactly.

[00:10:36] But so I feel like even with this summary we're not doing justice to the utter weirdness of this.

[00:10:44] So I honestly thought this might be a hoax but it's slightly too coherent to be a random word generator like those postmodern hoaxes.

[00:10:58] Yeah. And it's also too weird to be a hoax in the James Lindsay Peter...

[00:11:03] Right, right. Yeah cause what's the political target here?

[00:11:06] Right. I mean this does show so it's in a journal called Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology

[00:11:13] which my library gets because I was able to download it so it is a journal that exists.

[00:11:21] It does show like the hoax thing, the idea that gender studies is the only place you can get a hoax.

[00:11:29] Like this is way weirder than anything conceptual penis oriented.

[00:11:36] So it starts off with this sentence. Autism is a widespread scourge of humankind.

[00:11:43] Yeah cause we've been vaccinating our kids.

[00:11:47] That's just the price you pay.

[00:11:50] Only in Sweden are the human rights of the affected individuals often we preserved as far as jurisdiction and infrastructure are concerned which I didn't know.

[00:11:58] Do we not preserve the human rights of autistic individuals?

[00:12:02] We give them, we let them invent Facebook.

[00:12:07] And then it says that a causal therapy was proposed in 1975.

[00:12:13] And this is my favorite actually.

[00:12:17] So there are two citations for personal communications of people who supported it.

[00:12:22] Gregory Bateson and Nicholas Lumen who I don't know supported it.

[00:12:25] Jurgen Habermas's only criticism concerned the fact that an illegally printed edition of his book had been quoted.

[00:12:32] His only criticism of the causal therapy.

[00:12:36] Of the theory, yeah this theory of the causal therapy.

[00:12:40] I like that this is how just unassailable the theory is.

[00:12:47] Is that Jurgen Habermas's only criticism.

[00:12:50] He probably just ignored the whole fucking thing.

[00:12:52] I was like wait why are you quoting that book?

[00:12:55] Noam Chomsky showed interest in a long phone conversation which I have to think is also a low bar.

[00:13:03] And then Conrad Lorenz said he appreciated it but it was too difficult for him to fully understand.

[00:13:09] That sounds like a... I mean assuming these things happened this isn't just made up.

[00:13:15] This is like or if it's like a piece of performance alright I don't know.

[00:13:20] But if it really happened you could see an old Conrad Lorenz just being like yeah no it's interesting.

[00:13:27] I don't think I fully understand it but my favorite sentence or my favorite little passage.

[00:13:34] Thank you for asking.

[00:13:36] Whenever bonding between adults gets favored by natural selection next time around some pre-existing behavioral trait gets quote ritualized for the new purpose of bonding.

[00:13:47] Huxley Julian Huxley 1942.

[00:13:50] In this way frequently a mating gesture mounting gets usurped for a new function.

[00:13:57] Every TV viewer knows this from baboons for example even the females are mounting for this purpose.

[00:14:05] Every TV viewer knows this from baboons mount for the purpose of bonding.

[00:14:16] Now I'm a TV viewer. I feel like I might be a counter example to this because I am a TV viewer and I don't know that I didn't know.

[00:14:26] And I'm not sure I still do know that females and males mount for the purpose of bonding.

[00:14:36] I also still don't know. This is an epistemological conundrum.

[00:14:43] I feel like I also still don't know and I am also a TV viewer.

[00:14:46] You know I had a female dog who used to mount my leg.

[00:14:49] Yeah maybe this is what the authors are talking about.

[00:14:54] I thought they were going to go into dog human sex.

[00:14:58] There's definitely a lot of little hints that it's going to do it.

[00:15:01] There was love dog and human love but there is definitely a lot of hinting around that I knew you'd enjoy.

[00:15:12] I was like come on just get to it. I want a money shot.

[00:15:17] You know what they probably couldn't because of free speech.

[00:15:20] Free speech didn't allow them to.

[00:15:22] Yeah the PC and all the freaking college campus liberals.

[00:15:27] Here's another one of my favorites.

[00:15:29] So the whole mounting thing didn't go anywhere because all they said was you know that's just one example of what we're talking about smiling.

[00:15:39] And then all of a sudden they say but now imagine what is going to happen when the pampered bonding offspring is mirror competent which I assume means something like you recognize yourself in the mirror.

[00:15:49] Sigmund Freud spoke here of the dark continent of female sexuality having the playroom in mind.

[00:15:57] I don't think I know my Freud fairly well.

[00:16:00] I don't think this is what he meant at all.

[00:16:02] Turn the lights on Freud.

[00:16:03] So this is like the loved bonding offspring.

[00:16:06] This is like not totally clear how those two sentences are related to each other right.

[00:16:12] Not at all.

[00:16:13] This is where it sounds like and then it goes back to the dog.

[00:16:16] I don't understand the sentence even in the dog the joy of the adult will predictably sometimes cause a pup to renounce of a piece of food if the adult is too happily excited in the anticipation of getting it so one can predict.

[00:16:33] This is a question for field studies.

[00:16:36] I just I don't like I don't understand that I can't parse that sentence.

[00:16:41] I can't.

[00:16:42] Yeah, I haven't looked into this journal but do you think this was just like is this like a straight pay to publish apparently one of the authors has worked at CERN.

[00:16:52] You know like these apparently are real names.

[00:16:55] It's funny because so neuro skeptic.

[00:16:57] I don't know if you saw it but neuro skeptic in 2015 wrote a blog post about it and and and kind of broke it down the argument to the best of his ability and the author went into the comments and kind of responded to some of the comments.

[00:17:18] I did not see this.

[00:17:19] And it's funny neuro skeptic himself.

[00:17:23] He kind of was won over by the author not the paper but more just the the sincerity and heartwarming this of the message.

[00:17:36] And it's funny like you sort of start to think of this more in terms of some sort of artistic expression of something it makes it definitely makes more sense as a kind of some sort of, you know, new postmodern way of understanding deep human truths through other means besides,

[00:17:59] you know, empirical science and rational argument.

[00:18:04] It's not a very reliable method.

[00:18:07] I've learned a lot from David Lynch movies from from meditating, you know, you have to open your mind a little bit.

[00:18:18] I'm definitely putting I found the neuro skeptic the discover blog post some day but definitely putting a link into that and show notes, you know, progress in biophysics and molecular biology though, you know, find a good postmodern journal and publish it there.

[00:18:32] Where are you invading the hallowed halls of science, the purity of the disinterested search for truth.

[00:18:43] I mean, it's it's so I'm not convinced this is an entirely satire though.

[00:18:48] I don't think it's satire at all.

[00:18:50] I think it's like I think it is a, you know, it's like continental philosophy.

[00:18:56] But I say that and you know, like the email Tamler as no, I mean, like I like continental philosophy.

[00:19:07] And you like this?

[00:19:09] I like some of them.

[00:19:11] Oh my God.

[00:19:13] Oh yeah, I see the guy's comment and he says like, well, no, like you're saying not all of him.

[00:19:17] He's he's responding to somebody who says that that it's a false assumption that all elephants are autistic.

[00:19:23] And he says, oh, you're just using a different definition of autism.

[00:19:26] Yeah, it's not all elephants are autistic.

[00:19:29] Just the ones who are vaccinated.

[00:19:33] I take it the idea of autistic is just that they lack theory of mind, which I don't think people believe anymore.

[00:19:41] But yeah, yeah, that like, yeah, there's there's, I think, I think you're right.

[00:19:47] But I think it's just from some, some view that humans are special.

[00:19:52] They're qualitatively different from all other animals in our cognitive abilities.

[00:19:56] And that's more like a continuum probably the false assumption.

[00:19:59] But but still, I feel like I'm yes, ending this paper way too much.

[00:20:03] But also the the idea that once you through some audio technique send comforting sounds to the elephant and you cure its autism that it will suddenly learn to speak.

[00:20:17] That's a kind of a leap, it seems like right.

[00:20:20] Right. But at least it's falsifiable because the claim here is is that if we you know there's there's sub sub vocal for humans, right.

[00:20:29] Communication apparently goes on with all events.

[00:20:31] They're they're communicating to each other at a frequency that we can't hear.

[00:20:34] And so if we can just decode what it is to laugh, right?

[00:20:39] Because in the in the paper, they they say, well, look, it's usually smiles and it's usually a visual communication.

[00:20:45] That causes the bonding.

[00:20:47] But but they give that example of the kid whose mother started laughing and they're like, oh no, you can also have this this oral or joy that's communicated through bonding.

[00:21:00] And so therefore we could do with with elephants by by pumping this this sub vocal joy and causing them to bond and all of a sudden unleashing their full humanity.

[00:21:12] I like this by now suddenly operational proposal is sketched in the following and it's ethical motivation discussed.

[00:21:21] One thing I appreciated is that they really do get into the ethics behind it.

[00:21:26] Yeah, they're not just willy nilly going to do this.

[00:21:29] They have to figure out whether it's acceptable, whether it's permissible.

[00:21:32] If only your your AI overlords had, you know, stepped back to question what it is that they were unleashing on humankind.

[00:21:43] Oh, yeah. But this guy is all over the comments.

[00:21:47] Yeah.

[00:21:49] Was it wise on the part of sir and 3500 scientists decided to non renew their outdated 2000 safety report before creating the highest localized energy density anywhere in the universe on earth in their so-called Big Bang experiment.

[00:21:59] Oh, he that's the other thing that neuro skeptic talked about is that he sued to have this super collider not go off because he was worried it would create a black hole and destroy the Earth.

[00:22:12] But it was an unsuccessful suit.

[00:22:15] So I guess that's what made him sensitive to the ethics.

[00:22:20] You know, they're too big dangers black holes ripping the fabric of space time and talking elephants.

[00:22:27] We don't want to hear this.

[00:22:29] These are existential threats.

[00:22:31] The effect of altruists should.

[00:22:33] Well, should we wrap this up there and then we have a long discussion with Sam Harris coming up there.

[00:22:42] There will be no mounting for bonding purposes in the discussion.

[00:22:47] Not visual. No visual.

[00:22:49] No.

[00:22:51] We'll be right back.

[00:23:02] Welcome back to very bad wizards.

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[00:24:40] Yeah, you speaking of that you went on another podcast, right?

[00:24:43] That's right.

[00:24:45] I went on a podcast called the social exchange podcast shout out to Zach Rhodes.

[00:24:50] So I'll put a link to that and show notes.

[00:24:52] We actually got in a good discussion about something that I think we should talk about eventually.

[00:24:55] He's a specialist in addiction and I don't think we've covered that directly.

[00:25:00] Maybe at some point.

[00:25:02] So yeah, check the show notes.

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[00:27:14] And now let's bring on Sam Harris.

[00:27:17] We're lucky today to as promised have Sam Harris back on the show.

[00:27:22] Sam, I don't think you need an introduction to most of our audience, but for those who don't know, Sam is a prolific author, neuros.

[00:27:30] Do you call yourself a neuroscientist, Sam?

[00:27:31] You know, I do with some ambivalence.

[00:27:35] I answer to the name, but the reality is I consider myself much more of a philosopher of mind.

[00:27:41] I can imagine that raises some hackles over Tamler's neck.

[00:27:45] No, I don't care.

[00:27:47] As far as I'm concerned you could.

[00:27:49] I've managed to follow a path that has really every constituency objects to my self-identification.

[00:27:58] I think I'm going to have to change my gender soon just to confuse everybody.

[00:28:04] Yeah, the men have gotten together and we're not pleased with some of your recent statements.

[00:28:09] Right.

[00:28:11] But yeah, so my PhD obviously is in neuroscience, but I always went into neuroscience with philosophical interests.

[00:28:20] I never imagined I would be running a lab doing research on disease or fruit flies or anything that was not higher cognition.

[00:28:34] I did it because I wanted to write and think and speak about the mind and about propositional attitudes and moral reasoning.

[00:28:46] But I don't have a PhD in philosophy, so the many philosophers and philosopher grad students are concerned about that.

[00:28:56] In any case, I have no home.

[00:28:58] Well, if you can't call yourself a neuroscientist by dint of having a PhD in neuroscience, I don't know what would possibly qualify you.

[00:29:06] But I was going to say that is the longest most circuitous route to being an author that I can imagine is getting a PhD.

[00:29:12] Did you find that it opened doors actually?

[00:29:15] Yeah, definitely.

[00:29:18] If you're writing nonfiction, people care how you know or how you think you know what you're writing about.

[00:29:27] And I had started writing earlier because I thought I was going to write fiction.

[00:29:32] I dropped out of my undergraduate degree thinking I was going to write novels and there it really doesn't matter.

[00:29:38] Whether you have a degree, it's just the quality of your prose.

[00:29:41] So I was surprised to discover that I was no longer inclined to write fiction and then I had kind of orphaned myself by dropping out of school.

[00:29:57] And so I had to go back in order to, whether it was actually going to help my writing, I had to go back to just have the right biography to get in the door.

[00:30:06] But the truth is it was absolutely necessary intellectually.

[00:30:11] The stuff I was writing before I went back to school shouldn't have been published, not that I tried to get it published.

[00:30:19] But I had a lot to learn.

[00:30:23] Well with that very long rambly introduction, I don't say that Sam was rambling there.

[00:30:31] No, no.

[00:30:32] You always insult your guests.

[00:30:35] We usually insult you when you're not here.

[00:30:38] I've noticed.

[00:30:40] I was maligning my own follow-up questions through an introduction because what I was tasked to say is that today we have Sam on and primarily our goal is to talk about meditation and the self, stuff that we talked a bit about when we appeared on your podcast, Sam,

[00:30:57] but that we have had a growing interest in over the past few months.

[00:31:03] But I think we have a lot of asides to get through.

[00:31:06] Clearly, we seem to have gotten through some already.

[00:31:09] Is the podcast over?

[00:31:13] Yeah, thank you for coming on, Sam.

[00:31:16] We've been meaning to have you on for a while, but I'm about to do a panel in Sofia, Bulgaria on ego dissolution, psychedelics, the self.

[00:31:27] And meditation and I thought there's no better person to talk to about those things than you.

[00:31:35] So we have both been using your app on day 35.

[00:31:40] You had given us generously free versions of it soon after it was released.

[00:31:45] And because I've been meditating for a long time for a number of years now and because I tend to meditate for longer daily than just 10 minutes, which is the average length of yours, I had been sort of hesitant to dive into it.

[00:31:59] But I found, especially now that I'm getting more interested in the philosophy behind this meditation that it's been really useful in terms of how it explores what it is that we're doing when we meditate, the phenomenology of it, the philosophy behind it.

[00:32:20] And yeah, I've been really happy.

[00:32:23] It's opened some doors.

[00:32:26] Cool.

[00:32:28] Just to give my a little bit of background for me, because I was the opposite of Tamela, I've, I've meditated a handful on a handful of occasions, mostly just to see what it was like and in most cases to treat insomnia.

[00:32:42] So I was actually didn't do it for a while because it was like, okay, this is just a thing that I'm going to have to like to pick up like a brand new thing.

[00:32:52] And it's daunting.

[00:32:54] And I just wasn't sure what to expect.

[00:32:56] And I started doing it when we invited you to come on and you and I'm not going to say this lightly because honestly, I was a little worried that hearing your voice, Sam, every day was just going to remind me of recording.

[00:33:09] And I wasn't sure.

[00:33:11] It's going to annoy the hell out of you.

[00:33:13] Yeah, well not annoy, but you know, it was going to sometimes feel like you couldn't pay me to listen to Tamela's voice every day.

[00:33:17] And I have found not only how you say things, but what you say to be surprisingly helpful and lucid and, and you know, I'm on day, I've skipped days.

[00:33:30] It's taking me a while to pick up the habit.

[00:33:32] But boy, there are some days where it has really made a difference.

[00:33:36] And I was just telling Tamela yesterday that I've had a stressful couple of weeks to the end of the term.

[00:33:42] And there are moments where just because I've listened to your app, I've remembered to just take a moment, you know, like even in the car or, you know, sitting in my office chair and, and take a step back and do use some of the techniques that you talk about.

[00:33:58] And look, I don't know. I don't know from Adam, like I don't know other apps, how they work, but, but I found this to be pretty damn good.

[00:34:07] So, so I appreciate it.

[00:34:09] Nice. Nice. Pretty damn good. I'll take that blurb.

[00:34:11] Yeah. So let's start at a basic level.

[00:34:15] What do you take the primary goal of meditation to be the primary goal or several primary goals?

[00:34:23] Yeah, well, there are at least two. I mean, one is certainly more important than the other, but there are two things one could emphasize here.

[00:34:33] One is just not suffering unnecessarily, right?

[00:34:38] So just maximizing your, your wellbeing and so far as that's within your reach to do.

[00:34:44] I think meditation is a, not the only tool certainly, but, but a primary tool with which to do that.

[00:34:54] So that's a kind of Buddhist framing of the whole project.

[00:34:58] The Buddha spoke about suffering and the end of suffering.

[00:35:02] And you know, that's where that's how most people come into it.

[00:35:06] Most people notice that their experience isn't what they might hope certainly in most moments.

[00:35:14] And they're wondering whether or not it's possible to, to live a more fulfilling life.

[00:35:21] And you know, this becomes something that people notice even when they seem to have all the requisites for happiness in place.

[00:35:29] You know, their careers as they want it, their families as they want it.

[00:35:32] They, you know, they're, they're currently healthy.

[00:35:35] You know, nothing overt is, is especially wrong in their lives and that yet they notice that they're not,

[00:35:43] they don't have access to the range of positive mental states that they would expect and or that those states are incredibly fleeting

[00:35:55] and that they suffer, you know, a level of anxiety or, you know, shame or self doubt or just a range of negative emotions

[00:36:05] that just can't be kept at bay even when life seems to be going well.

[00:36:09] And so some meditation is really helpful there for reasons we can talk about.

[00:36:15] But the other reason to do it is just intellectual interest,

[00:36:19] just curiosity about what the mind is like and what can be noticed about it from the first person side.

[00:36:28] And I emphasize those, those two projects by turns, but they're definitely different.

[00:36:35] And the, you know, not everyone cares about the second one.

[00:36:38] But I, you know, I can, you know, I can sound like I only care about the second one for some period of time depending on where you catch me.

[00:36:45] It's funny because I also come at it more from the second perspective.

[00:36:52] And one of the issues I've had with the, with the Buddhist emphasis on suffering is I,

[00:37:00] it doesn't feel to me like I'm suffering.

[00:37:04] It definitely feels to me like I am leaving some good experiences on the table that I could be appreciating the world more.

[00:37:13] But the idea that I'm suffering and that because I've come at this as a fairly happy person, not too angry, not too anxious, not too stressed.

[00:37:23] And so yeah, it's funny that that is the number one Buddhist principle is that all of life is suffering.

[00:37:32] Okay. So I have to jump in here and say that this is funny.

[00:37:35] It's funny to me because I have the exact opposite intuition as Tamler and that the suffering is so clearly why I would go into it.

[00:37:46] And I think this gets, this is at the heart of our different intuitions about anti-natalism, Tamler.

[00:37:52] Because did you hit by the way on that point, did you ever talk to that guy?

[00:37:57] Was it David Benatar?

[00:37:59] Yeah, no. Did you have him on?

[00:38:00] Yeah, I did. I did. I did an anti-natalism podcast maybe a year ago or maybe that was two years ago. I don't know when.

[00:38:08] How did that go?

[00:38:10] It was interesting. I like the conversation. I didn't think his arguments in the end, there were some obvious missteps at least they seemed obvious to me that he was making and not acknowledging.

[00:38:24] So the debate kind of broke down in a few places. I was not persuaded by his philosophy. We can leave it there.

[00:38:35] It's fascinating to me, there are people for whom their psychology seems to be rigging their philosophy in a way that is not acknowledged.

[00:38:48] And this is obviously kind of an ad hominem argument that one should make sparingly. But occasionally in the position, whenever I'm talking to someone who claims to be a nihilist or claims to have philosophically reasoned himself into a position to wonder whether or not he should commit suicide.

[00:39:07] What seems to me to be happening is that you have a mood disorder masquerading as a series of philosophical insights.

[00:39:17] Like if someone just felt better in that moment, they wouldn't be finding certain ideas captivating.

[00:39:22] And I can't really say that directly about Benatar, but he really, he did not want to talk about himself at all to a degree that struck me as fairly bizarre.

[00:39:35] I mean he just couldn't let the conversation go in that direction at all and it was just...

[00:39:41] To anything personal?

[00:39:42] Yeah, I mean obviously he's got his own security concerns. People kind of go crazy when they hear his thesis and I think he's gotten death threats and all that.

[00:39:53] But I wasn't talking about where do you live and how can we find you. It was more like just what is your personal experience and how might that be relating to you finding this view so interesting.

[00:40:09] And they say that philosophy doesn't really touch the real world.

[00:40:15] If I could get a death threat for any philosophical position that I espoused, I'd consider it a victory because somebody was paying attention.

[00:40:20] Correct, yeah.

[00:40:22] Yeah, we're in the market for death threats.

[00:40:24] So Dave and I have come at this from two different perspectives. Which one of those made meditation an appealing route to explore?

[00:40:34] Well, it was really both but I should clear one thing up because there's a common misunderstanding around the term suffering that I hope I clear up some place in my app.

[00:40:47] I'm not sure. I mean as you know the app is not... I don't consider myself a Buddhist and my framing of meditation isn't explicitly Buddhist but in order to hide the fact that if there's any one tradition that I think has most of the right answers here it's very different.

[00:41:04] There are various strands of Buddhism. So I certainly give props to Buddhism but I don't push it as a religion anyone should subscribe to.

[00:41:15] But there's confusion around this notion of suffering in Buddhism because the Pali term is dukkha which is often translated as suffering.

[00:41:27] But the real meaning or the closer meaning is unsatisfactoriness.

[00:41:35] So life is unsatisfactory. So sensory experience is unsatisfactory. If for no other reason then it's impermanent.

[00:41:46] So conditions come together, you have this extremely pleasurable experience, you have this extremely satisfying change in your life.

[00:41:54] And then every one of those peak experiences has a half life and becomes a memory.

[00:42:01] And then you're thinking about this thing that happened in the past. In many cases you're thinking about how you can acquire that experience again or something like it.

[00:42:09] And you're still on this treadmill of seeking to become happy, seeking to be gratified by a change in the contents of consciousness.

[00:42:21] And that effort, that whole effort to continually become, to change experience, that is what the Buddha now considered in principle unsatisfactory.

[00:42:36] And meditation is prescribed as a technique for one understanding all the mechanics of that more and more viscerally, not necessarily conceptually.

[00:42:51] And achieving a state of equanimity with the changes in experience so that you're not holding on to what's pleasant and disappearing.

[00:43:03] You're not resisting what's unpleasant and inevitably appearing.

[00:43:08] And you're discovering more and more that consciousness has an intrinsic character of freedom, as we'll talk about selflessness, that is on some level unperturbed by its contents and by changes.

[00:43:26] So as a remedy for unhappiness, it's promised to be a doorway into a fundamental insight about the nature of consciousness that can get you to no longer seek to be happy in some future moment.

[00:43:44] Or to seek that much less and less at every moment you can remember what consciousness is actually like and to just come to rest in the present.

[00:43:55] It's not that the Buddha failed to acknowledge that there was a hierarchy of conventional states of happiness that are good in a conventional way.

[00:44:10] And it's not that all life is suffering in the usual sense.

[00:44:15] I think there's a sutta in the Pali Canon called the Mahamangala Sutta, which is the sutta on great happiness.

[00:44:25] He basically sketches a kind of ladder of increasing states of happiness.

[00:44:31] Like having a healthy body is a form of happiness, having a family that is healthy and unthreatened by outer circumstances is a form of happiness.

[00:44:45] In terms of our preferences in life, he certainly conceded that it's better to be healthy and surrounded by people who love you than to be terrorized by enemies.

[00:44:57] And so that's the sense that people often take from the notion that life is suffering is that Buddhism is a kind of nihilistic philosophy that negates every conventional form of happiness, which is not true.

[00:45:16] Yeah, that makes a lot more sense. And this idea of life being unsatisfying or that happiness or good experience seems right around the corner and to recognize what's good about the present moment is something that I still feel like I'm nowhere near good enough at doing.

[00:45:38] And that is something that does deeply resonate with me. And it'll be interesting as we explore its connections with the self, how those two things are related.

[00:45:49] Yeah, there's a way in which if we took misery to mean that misunderstanding, Sam, that you were describing, I don't qualify really for being miserable.

[00:46:02] I have a good life compared to 99.9% of all humans who have existed. And not only that, I actually am what psychologists might call high and positive affect.

[00:46:14] So I am generally experiencing good things in life. It's that low level signal that part of it, that word resistance that you use this really captures.

[00:46:28] I think a lot of the feeling that I'm trying really hard to let go, like I said, I'm you know, day 12 or 13. And that's what I'm struggling against the most there is this low lying misery, maybe isn't the right word but it's a source of unease in life that I can't shake no matter

[00:46:48] even if I'm smiling and happy and jokie. So it doesn't really like it's not fair to say I'm suffering in any in any way that we might use that colloquially. But there is this, this existential unease that that is always at the bottom of all my experiences because

[00:47:03] they're going to end. And there's something happening bad in the future, like death like that stupid app that Tamler just bought that reminds you you're going to die five times a week croak week.

[00:47:13] Yeah, yeah. It is Dave's worst nightmare.

[00:47:16] Well, I know my own app. I do that to myself 10 times a day.

[00:47:21] If you're at all self aware, or if you're, or if you're Jewish, you do notice that even in the midst of everything good happening that life is fragile, right?

[00:47:36] Every such every circumstances is deeply fragile. And, you know, I know people who are especially high and positive affect who seem never to think about that. Right.

[00:47:48] So it's like, these are people who are like, you know, the opposite of, you know, Woody Allen, right?

[00:47:53] Right. They're like the Labradors of human beings.

[00:47:55] Yeah. And I so I know I have a few friends who are like this, who just don't I mean, it's like they're not going to think about death until someone close to them dies or they're in the hospital.

[00:48:08] Right.

[00:48:09] And literally, they don't spend one minute of any day thinking about death. And, you know, I'm not like that. And contemplatives in any tradition, admonish people not to be like that because it's really it's death that that gives a kind of urgency to an examined life.

[00:48:30] But, you know, it depending on who you are, it can really seem like, you know, just pure upside to be that sort of person because you know, you're going to die when you're going to die, you're not going to you're not going to

[00:48:43] you're going to stay off death by worrying about it. I mean, the utility of worry is something that's worth considering because in most cases it's it's it serves no purpose and we basically suffer twice.

[00:48:56] But if it can help you get your priorities straight to think about death, which I think it can it's worth it's worth doing. But as you as you say the the seed of the dissolution of all your happiness is a parent in in almost any moment that you think about

[00:49:18] I mean, the moment you see your child, you know, joyfully celebrating is a moment where you can reflect on the fact that not only will the child not only is the child's life vulnerable to any crazy thing that can happen and the you as a parent, you know, worry about this rather a lot.

[00:49:44] There's just a bittersweetness to the fact that they're changing every day and disappearing as children. It's like I noticed that I'm relating to my daughters as though they're always going to be this age.

[00:49:56] Right.

[00:49:57] I mean, I was like, I'm just sort of used to the fact that I've got somebody who's three feet tall in the house and talks and things like a five year old and that's who she is. And then all of a sudden something will change.

[00:50:09] I'll just she'll just grow either cognitively or emotionally or linguistically or just physically by one increment that I notice. And I realize, oh fuck, you know, this is like that person yesterday who, you know, mispronounced the word animal will never mispronounce animal again.

[00:50:27] Right. And it was so cute and now it's gone. And that's fucking awful.

[00:50:33] I actually, I'm one of those people who doubt that I know I'm going to die intellectually but I don't it doesn't bother me or I don't worry about it. What does bother me is that my daughter is going to go to college in three and a half years.

[00:50:46] And that's just and it's not even that I worry about her safety or somebody harming her as much as just I have so enjoy having her as a daily feature of my life.

[00:50:58] And that's that thing. I mean, the worst thing you can do is worry about that for the next three and a half years and fail to appreciate the time that you have.

[00:51:07] But I think that is that that is one of the scariest things about getting older for me is not dying but just watching the changes in the people around me and what's happening and how that affects our relationship and how that affects.

[00:51:26] I this idea of resistance that Dave brought up and you brought up is really interesting to me if I could nail down one of the best things that meditation has done is it's identified resistance as a source.

[00:51:40] Not not the thing that you're resisting as the source of suffering but the resistance as the source of suffering.

[00:51:47] And when you recognize that it is a hugely powerful technique for anything from like aches or pains to just thoughts or fears or it's not the thing itself that's so bad.

[00:51:59] It's how you just instinctively react against it and steal yourself against it or worry about it that often is causing you the greatest unease.

[00:52:09] And when you let that go and you just recognize the thing itself it's like it just relaxes you.

[00:52:16] Yeah. Well, so there's a another technique here which I'm sure David knows a lot about from psychology but it's just it's a framing effect that is so powerful here or a cognitive reappraisal.

[00:52:29] So that I mean the same sensation is it to take physical discomfort as a sort of the coarsest case, you know, there are all kinds of pains and physical stresses that if felt under one circumstance would signal a kind of medical emergency that would provoke terror or something like terror.

[00:52:53] But the exact same catalog of sensations in another context could actually make you happy.

[00:53:00] I mean, so I just asked people to imagine what it would be like to wake up in the middle of the night feeling physical sensations that were identical to those you felt during your last artist and most gratifying workout right so just imagine what it feels like to.

[00:53:17] I didn't think you were going with work out there but I'm glad.

[00:53:22] But like go to go just think you know if you lift weights right so just or whatever it is if you're if you sprint you know for intervals or you just jog I mean just imagine getting your heart rate up to something near its maximum putting stress everywhere and yet doing it.

[00:53:41] It's exactly what you want to do in that moment and after you've done it you're not traumatized by the experience it's exactly what you had hope.

[00:53:49] And you expect it's just it's all it's all a win.

[00:53:53] And yet if without that frame or given some other frame.

[00:54:00] You know it could constitute torture right and so it's the power of concepts here is is.

[00:54:07] Barely impressive and I would just add that this is distinct and I talk about this in the app and it's certainly useful to bring this into a kind of meditation practice but this kind of cognitive reappraisal and the power of it is distinct from mindfulness or or or meditation as I'm.

[00:54:26] Describing it it's not it's another tool and.

[00:54:30] In in some ways it's it's in certain ways it's it's it's more powerful than mindfulness me it's it's the difference is take a fear that many people have met many of us have had I certainly had it the fear of public speaking.

[00:54:47] There's sort of three ways you three levels at which you could address this problem you know leaving pharmacology aside I mean one is just to be mindful of the anxiety whenever it arises and.

[00:55:00] You really can do that and you and you if you're being sufficiently mindful.

[00:55:06] You know less anxiety will arise but it'll still tend to arise in every moment that you're not mindful so every moment that you're lost in thought and thinking about oh my God I gotta give that speech tomorrow.

[00:55:19] Anxiety will arise again you'll still have the physiology of it and then you then you can be mindful of it and and as you say Tamler will notice that you're suffering in that moment is not based on the on the physiological response is based on your resistance.

[00:55:35] To it and your interpretation of it and your further perseveration about you know what it means for you to be such a schmuck was afraid to talk to.

[00:55:43] The class or whatever and how did you become this person other people are able to do it and why can't you do it and so you're thinking every moment of the day and.

[00:55:52] Once you learn how to be mindful you can interrupt that and those interruptions provide moments of real relief from the suffering component.

[00:56:01] And your relief in those moments is not predicated on the the anxiety going away because that means the anxiety has a half life you know it can't go away instantly it will take 30 seconds or so to dissipate.

[00:56:14] And yet if if your mindfulness is strong you can notice that you're free of it even while it's there as a matter of suffering.

[00:56:22] So that's that's fine and yet you're new if that's your only tool with which to address this problem of stage fright.

[00:56:31] You will you'll continue you'll certainly continue to have this experience of being anxious about speaking and then being mindful of anxiety.

[00:56:40] Yeah.

[00:56:41] But if you can reframe things the way we just described if one you can just it's helpful to reframe the anxiety itself as an emotion which is fairly similar to a classically positive emotion like excitement right so you can notice that anxiety and excitement are fairly similar

[00:57:00] and you're just you're just tag you're tagging one as highly negative and the other as as you know something you'd pay to feel before you get on a roller coaster.

[00:57:09] Then you can become you can begin begin to to reduce its power over you and that's a conceptual remedy but there's a third piece which is you should you could also just have more experience speaking in public and begin to feel good about it

[00:57:25] and to actually you know feel rewarded by it and like to do it and then that becomes a far more basic antidote to this whole complex of associations around around doing that thing.

[00:57:41] And then you can really be someone who just doesn't feel anxious at all so it's not it's not that mindfulness got you there.

[00:57:48] And I would say that mine there's probably no amount of mindfulness that represents an intelligent response self sufficient response to this problem in the absence of also just doing the thing that you're anxious about doing you got you have to do that otherwise you're always just going to be thinking and then being mindful of the consequences of thinking.

[00:58:08] So anyway.

[00:58:09] So I was going to in that in that context of emotion regulation which is something that that I find fascinating that that I honestly take as the primary instrumental goal of meditating that distinction helps helps me because it is easy to think of mindfulness or whatever that focus that you're getting during meditation as a panacea.

[00:58:30] And psychologists often distinguish between emotion regulation turns between regulation that happens after you're starting to experience an emotion versus the things that you do to not experience it just like you said right and those those ladder ones the things that you do to not experience the anxiety are always going to be way way more effective.

[00:58:52] And I find that maybe you can help me with this time I don't know if you have this experience as well but I find that sometimes when I'm trying to consciously down regulate some anxiety that I'm having or even trying to use something like like mindfulness.

[00:59:09] I feel like I'm engaging in self deception.

[00:59:11] Like if I say well I don't need to worry about that.

[00:59:15] I think to myself no but I do.

[00:59:18] If I don't worry about it then I'm not going to get it done and I can't I can lie to myself and say this isn't important that I shouldn't feel anxious about it.

[00:59:27] But I kind of think I should feel anxious about it.

[00:59:31] That line was a month ago.

[00:59:33] Exactly like I'm getting a bunch of emails I'm being as mindful as I want.

[00:59:38] Valentine's Day was the 14th now it's March.

[00:59:43] Well so one other piece to clear up here is that there's a bit of a paradox here which is that you can't be mindful of a negative emotion so that it will go away right and people try to do that they're suddenly trying to push away this negative mental state that they have a version to i.e. resistance to and they think that they're going to be able to get it done.

[01:00:08] They're using mindfulness as the antidote and that's not actually mindfulness.

[01:00:14] It's a way of you can be hyper vigilant you can be paying attention to your emotional state but if you're paying attention so that your experience will change in the next moment you're playing the same game of trying to manipulate things you're always playing and you are not actually being technically mindful.

[01:00:38] So mindfulness really there's no way around it mindfulness entails in that moment a real acceptance of the contents of consciousness in that moment you just have to be truly indifferent to the feeling of anxiety.

[01:00:56] And then then it dissent then you're in that moment or no longer captured by thought you're no longer giving an energy and then it does dissipate very very quickly.

[01:01:05] So what about rumination because I find that that's the only way that I you know some there's research showing that men especially for instance are prone to ruminating about angry thoughts and women more about sad thoughts but.

[01:01:18] But the content of those thoughts seems intrusive and oh yeah and you're you're it's like you're experiencing the emotion anew every time that thought pops in your head.

[01:01:28] Yeah that well that's what I'm saying rumination is the problem I mean otherwise known as thinking you know it's it's your if you're if you're thinking captures you.

[01:01:38] The spell that has to be broken in each moment of mindfulness is the identification with thought.

[01:01:46] I wonder if there's a step in how mindfulness accomplishes the dissipation of the emotion and I certainly feel this way for me when I'm successful which is definitely the minority of the time.

[01:02:02] But it involves the act of being mindful just relaxes my body and it relaxes and when my body is relaxed that affects my emotion and I can start to put things better in proper perspective.

[01:02:16] And had I not had the mindfulness of what's going on my bot that wouldn't do the body wouldn't have reacted in that way and so the dissipation doesn't happen if it's not a necessary condition it's almost a necessary condition my body.

[01:02:32] It's a tense bodily person and when my body relaxes my mind relaxes more.

[01:02:41] Yeah well that's a component to feeling better certainly and and mindfulness can can help initiate that.

[01:02:49] But the crucial thing about mindfulness itself is that the freedom from suffering that it allows isn't predicated on anything changing right so I go once mindfulness gets very strong.

[01:03:07] You can notice that consciousness is intrinsically free of its contents in a way that can be recognized even in the midst of classically unpleasant contents.

[01:03:20] So you can make your body as tense as you want you can be as uptight as you want you could have been as filled with rage as you've ever been a moment ago.

[01:03:30] And if you actually have a strong mindfulness practice if I said okay what about being mindful right now right.

[01:03:40] If if in that moment if in that next moment you become mindful of that whole constellation of of sensations.

[01:03:49] You know you still feel the physiology of rage you see your body still tight you're still in the situation.

[01:03:56] You can recognize in that moment and perhaps only for a moment right depending on how much you know concentration you have that consciousness is already free of this apparent problem.

[01:04:10] You know there's there's a kind of like waking up from a dream component to mindfulness all phenomenology is equalized and it's everything we could conceivably experience and everything we do in fact experience.

[01:04:25] In this moment is an expression of consciousness is made of consciousness again.

[01:04:32] This is not a metaphysical statement about the universe I'm not saying that you know this doesn't have something to do with the brain at the level of our subjectivity at the level of of of experience.

[01:04:43] All there is is consciousness and its contents and that can be when mindfulness really recognizes that it.

[01:04:52] There's a freedom.

[01:04:55] From implication and from and from self which we haven't talked about yet which isn't predicated on anything changing.

[01:05:04] I understand that as a as a help I was just talking about as a helpful technique and maybe this is personally reminded me of some Damasio stuff about the body.

[01:05:15] Sometimes being prior to the emotion rather than a result of the emotion as we sometimes think of it and that resonates with me on this issue.

[01:05:28] Let's let's go into the to the weeds about meditation and the self so I've done a lot of guided meditations I the 10% happier app was the one that I used before I started using yours this last yeah that's great.

[01:05:44] And that's a good one to and one thing you do that they don't do as much is I don't know the way I was thinking of it is it's a kind of radical empiricism where when we're meditating you instruct the listeners to really just not go by their concepts but go by what they're actually feeling and experiencing.

[01:06:09] So the example that something clicked for me I'm not sure what is when you talk about the hands and the feeling of the hands and I often that's often an object of concentration for me.

[01:06:21] What you said roughly is that you're what you don't you don't feel a hand right now that there's a whole hand there you feel a tingling in an area that you kind of infer to be your hand or a coldness or vibration.

[01:06:38] But you don't feel a hand and then you also talk about the body as kind of a cloud of sensation when you're sitting with your eyes closed.

[01:06:48] That's how it actually and what you seem to be pressing throughout the sessions is this idea of really just focusing on the direct experience rather than the normal thing that we take to be the body.

[01:07:06] And I'm wondering what why what's this there does seem something deeply true about it but why are you coming at it that way in a way that some other guided meditations aren't.

[01:07:18] Yeah well this is something that Joseph certainly does in general and this is just straight the past and a practice which is which is the source of mindfulness as most people practice it.

[01:07:30] And it really is just it is a just a truth you know empirically again from the first person side that if you pay close enough attention to the the experience of having a hand and leave leave vision aside because this is this is not as clear visually but if you just if your if your eyes are closed as many people as they are for many people when they meditate.

[01:07:56] And you just feel your body or any part of your body you you can notice the distinction between the idea you have of its shape based on on vision and the actual sensations that are being delivered from that part of your body and the sensations are these changing and fleeting.

[01:08:19] Percepts which are you know tingling and pressure and pain and itching and temperature and and and it's but none of that is shaped like a hand and and when it and the feeling that it is is a is a coarser grained conceptually framed.

[01:08:38] Mode of not really paying very close attention and what you're trying to do in mindfulness certainly in the beginning is pay close enough attention to experience so that you're building the requisite concentration to to be mindful in the first place right it's just it's hard to the experience is one of of being more or less perpetually lost and thought

[01:09:08] or or buffeted around by thought even in those moments when you're when you're able to pay attention and the antidote to that is concentration so there is a level of concentration that everyone's whether they talk about it or not that everyone's trying to achieve by linking consecutive moments of mindfulness together and one.

[01:09:31] You know what the signature of that is to notice that you know when you're paying attention to the body.

[01:09:38] You're noticing fleeting sensations that you can you can be connecting with more or less clearly at the level of attention and noticing that they're impermanence and that is and noticing impermanence does become a again this is not really thought through it kind of this is just something that arrives as kind of firmware update of your of your mind.

[01:09:58] But it becomes an antidote to the kind of resistance and clinging to experience we were talking about earlier so at when you're really noticing the fleeting character of phenomenon on a deep level you begin to feel like it's impossible to cling to pleasant experience and to and it's completely pointless to push away unpleasant experience every there's there's just nothing solid there.

[01:10:25] In each moment and and so then and when you arrive at that place the mind becomes more and more a quantum is.

[01:10:33] And that's a you know so and so that's part of the path but so that yeah that's the link I'm not totally getting so number one that you just focus on the raw sensations as much as you can and try to make it as continuous as you can.

[01:10:49] Then you also notice if you're doing that that certain sensations come and they go and and that they're impermanent what's the connection between that and avoiding the kind of resistance or clinging that.

[01:11:05] They were trying to avoid.

[01:11:07] Well traditionally and again this is this is not something I emphasize very much in my approach to distinguish my approach from what Joseph tends to teach is that in in Joseph's school of Buddhism and Joseph is very much a Buddhist teacher who's teaching you know classic Burmese vipassana.

[01:11:29] In his approach it's to notice the with deeper and deeper clarity what I call the three characteristics of all phenomenon and those are we've spoken about all three to some degree already in this conversation.

[01:11:46] And that the poly terms are a niche aduca and anata impermanence unsatisfactoriness and selflessness.

[01:11:54] And so and you can your practice can emphasize each of these by turns and each has the effect of disengage one in order to notice any of those things clearly you have to be not lost in thought right you're not it's not a matter of thinking about these things incessantly.

[01:12:17] It's a matter of actually noticing that all the contents of consciousness are impermanent unsatisfactory by virtue of impermanence and selfless also by virtue of impermanence there's no unchanging permanent self carried from one right to carry through from one moment to the next.

[01:12:37] And so impermanence really is the kind of foundational insight in this style of practice where you're you're you're noticing that nothing lasts for more than a second.

[01:12:50] I mean the more closely you pay attention to it the more you're in touch with almost like the atoms of experience and they're they're constantly you know winking in and out of existence.

[01:13:02] And so the possibility of holding on to anything just begins to recede and and then a greater in the general case.

[01:13:15] Although there are some detours here which can be somewhat unpleasant the general general case is deeper and deeper equanimity and well being with all of that as you as you begin to notice this more and more.

[01:13:28] And then and you're in the the impossibility of suffering over the the kinds of things you have tended to suffer over the difference in my approach and this is something that I got from.

[01:13:40] So Chen practice and from Advaita Vedanta and you know my experiences in just other schools of meditation is that.

[01:13:49] You can notice selflessness directly right and selflessness that's not dependent on noticing impermanence first right it's not it's not a matter of everything's changing so fast that there could there's no place for the for the concept of self to attach.

[01:14:07] It's no you can actually notice that there's no center to experience in each moment without noticing any particular impermanence and without actually even having a very fine grained level of concentration on phenomenon.

[01:14:25] So like it will take go back to your original question you could notice that even while having the concept of a hand in place.

[01:14:33] The focusing on the sensation and that of the focus on observing your thoughts I take.

[01:14:41] What I feel and tell me if this is close to to the thinking behind this but one of the things I feel is that I am being dislodged like my myself is being dislodged so when when Taylor describes that feeling of his hands.

[01:14:56] Really isn't the same as what you would think about your feeling of your hands or when you know one of the things I noticed I don't know if you guys have similar experiences but I noticed at times when I would meditate under a lot of anxiety.

[01:15:12] I noticed exactly where my anxiety is in my body so it's like somewhere in my core and there was one time where I was just deeply sad about something and I was I was meditating and I realized the sadness is completely different place like it felt like at the base of my head somewhere.

[01:15:29] Now I was like oh that's so weird.

[01:15:31] But in noticing those things.

[01:15:34] I feel like what what's happening is I am.

[01:15:38] All of the things that I consider part of who I am and my identity, which includes the physical sensations that that I add up together holistically to make me feel like myself my presence in space, but also really importantly my thoughts that.

[01:15:53] Link together thus giving me a sense of permanence I think that deeply the sense of me being a continuous individual over time comes from the fact that there is there's overlap in my thoughts.

[01:16:07] That this the practice is trying really hard to dislodge me as if I can't I can't shake the language of dualism so forgive me but there's a there's a way in which just purely metaphorically not metaphysically it feels as if somebody is coming in and kicking my kicking my soul out of my my body.

[01:16:29] So embody aren't the right words there, but it is it is taking me out of all of the things that I would normally associate with who I am deeply.

[01:16:38] And I'm this is what I'm in the midst of the process of resisting every time I go on to your app.

[01:16:45] I get caught up in identifying again with my bodily sensations and identifying with my thoughts and and finding it hard to think that this well this is just me.

[01:16:54] What are you dislodging here Sam.

[01:16:56] Right.

[01:16:57] Right.

[01:16:58] I'll say this one thing before I forget that I think Tamler what you brought up about Sam's for lack of a better term empiricist approach.

[01:17:04] Yeah, is absolutely critical.

[01:17:07] I think for my ability to follow you Sam because I think that I find a lot of resistance the minute the minute.

[01:17:15] I've noticed this in myself and this is judgmental and I don't like it but the minute that there is some idea included in there that is not that something I'm going to argue against.

[01:17:25] Yeah, yeah, it loses me it completely loses me so it's deeply important I think for you to focus only on the aspects of consciousness that are immediately observable to I think anybody.

[01:17:37] Yeah, yeah I mean this given my background given all the time I've spent criticizing religion and what I consider to be unfounded belief you know it's natural for me to teach this in a way that that doesn't rely on faith in any normal sense.

[01:17:58] I mean the only faith you need to get this process started and to keep it going is the faith that is the faith of a kind of scientific hypothesis that you know if I run this experiment on myself something interesting might happen and you're being told from somebody like me in this case that you know something

[01:18:19] happened and here are the sort of landmarks you could expect but you know here's how you test it you don't believe me just just test this just test this claim and there's nothing to believe apart from that just do the experiment.

[01:18:38] I mean that said my approach here is more intrusive and philosophical than is normal what's not what's normal in a meditation app.

[01:18:53] And this is the normal approach of teaching for PASNA you know for a very long time to people. It's just you give the technique you give the practice you teach people how to be mindful and you give them very little expectation around what constitutes success here and what might happen or should happen if they're actually able to follow the experiment through.

[01:19:19] And so what you so people just they just do their practice without any real expectation and that's fine for a time but it's a little bit like opening a gym and giving people all the equipment to work out you know so there are dumbbells and there's a pull up bar and there's you know all the different weight stations and you teach them how to use it all safely and rationally and they do that.

[01:19:44] And so that's one sort of gym but.

[01:19:47] Imagine a gym where you did all of that but there were also posters on the wall of you know whoever Arnold Schwarzenegger and his prime where you could you could immediately understand that.

[01:20:00] Okay that this is actually going in a direction that is fairly unusual and esoteric and hard one and it's you know if my biceps don't look like that.

[01:20:16] You know barring you know genetic anomalies you know it's because I'm not making precisely the effort that is required to get your biceps to look like that so if I and so it's it's the the I think it's important to without any religious bullshit or dogmatism.

[01:20:35] Because I you know all this is very is anchored to my experience but I think it's important to give people an expectation of just what what success looks like and what what is actually there to be noticed and so I there's more of that that comes into my my instruction than it than is normal and I think some people find that very valuable but some people can find it.

[01:20:57] Distracted so what's interesting so to what what is very useful about the normal vipassana approach that you've described is to remove expectations I think that yeah that is an obstacle to developing a successful habit just to like if you if you have this expectation and all of a sudden you've been meditating for four months and it's not happening for you.

[01:21:21] Then you're more likely to give it up and so I found again I only have experience with the 10% happier one they're really good about just this is a habit they approach it like they would approach basketball practice or you know piano practice there's going to be frustrating times there's it that it doesn't matter just do the thing and we'll talk about where we're going later in some ways I think one of the reasons I've been in my life.

[01:21:51] I'm able to appreciate your app is that I've been doing it and I've developed the habit with the habit in place I'm ready to have more of the expectations and more ready to think about why I'm doing it now I don't know because I can't run my life over again and and start with your approach.

[01:22:13] But I do think there was something valuable about removing the removing expectations and just telling me to do the thing because it's an intrinsically enjoyable and relaxing and nice thing to do anyway you know.

[01:22:28] Yeah and that's all fine I agree with that it's just that the truth is it's when you go on intensive retreat in that tradition you're given a different set of expectations and it's one where it's one that I think is is.

[01:22:49] It's ultimately misleading right so you're in that tradition.

[01:22:54] You're given the expectation that there's really nothing you can notice about consciousness in this moment that represents true freedom right you're not there's nothing that the mind of the Buddha can't be recognized right now coincident with with an ordinary.

[01:23:16] Perception and this is again this speaks specifically of the kind of the Burmese tradition of the past and has been so influential in the West and you're given a sense that that.

[01:23:26] Freedom or enlightenment is very far away and that really the only thing you can do is be very patient and give up all expectation of getting there anytime soon.

[01:23:40] And just pay attention to what's arising in this moment and given that framing what's arising in this moment it can become a kind of.

[01:23:50] You know it and this also just falls out of this notion of Duke or unsatisfactoriness basically you all there is to notice here is the evidence of your on enlightenment you're left with a kind of vigil that is is implicitly at least if not explicitly waiting for something to happen.

[01:24:12] There's no reason to pay attention to the breath really unless you're waiting for some improvement you know and and this improvement again in the context of intensive retreat.

[01:24:22] There's a there's a there's a you know there's this phenomenology of kind of schlepping up the mountaintop of mindfulness and having some really strange things about your experience happen and change.

[01:24:37] And the point of all of that is to uproot negative emotions or do we have to do something about a dog or.

[01:24:47] Talking.

[01:24:49] Does that dog speak English.

[01:24:52] There's no amount of training practice like it's a UPS truck there's nothing I can do right outside a super stimulus.

[01:25:02] You know I want to also say like I agree Tamler that the some there's some reason to do it and that it's a pleasurable activity but I like for anybody who might share my experience sometimes it's really not pleasurable.

[01:25:15] Sometimes yeah I can't wait until that whatever 10 12 minutes is up like I find myself.

[01:25:21] You know what happened to me the other day Sam the one and only time I've had a technical problem with your app.

[01:25:29] I was listening and meditating and you go through obviously long pauses because if you talk throughout it would be horrible but but at some point I guess the app crashed.

[01:25:39] And I was like how the fuck long have I been doing this man this I went and looked at my phone and it had frozen.

[01:25:46] I've got a sucker but it can be really it can be a really distressing experience and I've even had it happen that maybe this is because it's working that that sometimes it it has caused anxiety in me to be that reflective of what's going on.

[01:26:05] And what I one of the things I wanted to ask you again from the perspective of a new biz is surely this isn't all great.

[01:26:13] I mean you hear people talk about meditation ad nauseam and it's like it's like it's the fucking you know best thing since cheesecake and and I fear that that maybe there are these negative occasional aspects to the experience into the practice that people are ignoring because they're proselytizing but I don't know.

[01:26:34] Right. Yeah well there's obviously a lot of hype around mindfulness and you know paradoxically while while I emphasize its connections to science as much as is relevant I think a lot of the weight that people are putting on new scientific findings around mindfulness is premature.

[01:26:54] I mean I think because there's nothing you know it's like you know whether or not mindfulness is good for for stress reduction or boosts your immune system or you know staves off cortical thinning or anything else that you for which there is now some data that that's not the deepest reason to do it and there's certainly no linear correlation between.

[01:27:18] Practice and feeling better in one's life in a in a global sense and I think there are certainly aspects to becoming more aware of your experience.

[01:27:31] They can be unpleasant on balance but still represent a positive change in your life.

[01:27:36] It's like I mean one example that that often use here which many of us have experienced certainly the beginning of practice is that the moment you go from being someone who has never even never even heard of the concept of mindfulness to somebody who's now practicing somewhat.

[01:27:54] You become aware of features of your own mind that are not flattering and you're more aware of them.

[01:28:03] Yeah right so you're more aware of how neurotic you are and how self centered you are and how what your actual motives are in in various relationships and exchanges and you know I mean I went through one.

[01:28:17] Period in my practice where there's no question I was just my self consciousness was being amplified by practice right it was it was a kind of a negative.

[01:28:28] I mean it's not true mindfulness and I just remember I would have experiences where I'd be in a Starbucks or something.

[01:28:35] You know engaging a stranger at it you know like a cashier would be the classic example and I would just feel I was so aware of my mind that you know it was I felt worse in those encounters with other people.

[01:28:55] I was so aware of my my interpersonal anxiety and my you know it just it amplified my neurosis interpersonally for a time and that's not to it.

[01:29:08] So whether you consider that a liability of mindfulness or just a deviation from actual mindfulness I don't know but it could be inevitable for some people to experience something like that.

[01:29:19] And I get at the analogy to sports I would often make which is useful here.

[01:29:24] You know it's just true that if you get really into exercise which is generically good for you and to be recommended to almost everybody.

[01:29:32] You know you there are injuries you can have you know didn't feel right to be doing push ups because you have a bad shoulder or whatever and there's but there's just there's no question that the general phenomenon of becoming more fit is is that's the direction of progress.

[01:29:49] You're almost everybody.

[01:29:51] That's good to hear though that's I feel like it's good to know that that that on your journey that you could have moments like that.

[01:30:00] I don't know why it's comforting.

[01:30:02] Yeah but in terms of a daily practice of you know 10 minutes or even an hour.

[01:30:07] I think that the vast majority of people will not experience anything significantly negative from that apart from you know the boredom or just the resistance to doing it and not getting deep enough into it to actually see the point of it.

[01:30:25] You can just it can spit you out because it just doesn't seem like a good use of your time in the end because you're not actually having the kinds of insights that are have been promised.

[01:30:39] The people who don't think it's a good use of their time are using their other time better than I am.

[01:30:46] You know one of the reasons why I never had that problem is what would I be doing right now if I wasn't meditating for half an hour.

[01:30:54] You know it's not a huge opportunity cost for me a lot of the time.

[01:31:00] Let's transition to this sense of self or this idea of the illusion of self.

[01:31:09] One of the things that was kind of an epiphany for me was that on having no head it's not an epiphany in in a permanent way but that you talk about you just mention it in one of your guided meditations this book by Douglas Harding and then I got it.

[01:31:30] And there's something really powerful about that image and in terms of just reorienting your understanding of your experience and your relation to your experience.

[01:31:42] It's something I have yet to articulate well certainly to people around me who haven't read it or who don't feel it.

[01:31:50] If I try to explain it to my wife and daughter they just get angry or annoyed.

[01:31:58] But there's something just so deeply right about it where you take your head to be is actually the entire world that's in your experience right now.

[01:32:10] There is some line in the book where he says I lost a head but I gained a whole world and there's something totally right about that.

[01:32:18] If you're just paying attention again it's this kind of radical empiricism where forget what you know and what people tell you and what you infer from looking in the mirror or hitting on your head.

[01:32:30] Just think about what you're actually experiencing right now and that's what you'll find.

[01:32:38] I don't know how you've integrated it into your, did it mean anything for you or what it means for you?

[01:32:46] I speak about Harding in a few places in the app. I think there's actually a lesson on him.

[01:32:53] Yeah, his analogy on having no head and that's a great book and he's written some other books that have great exercises in them.

[01:33:04] He came through some traditional door. I think it was mostly Zen he was studying back in the day.

[01:33:13] He was pretty early into I think it was probably in the 50s that he became interested in Zen.

[01:33:19] Based on the insights he was having he had his own framing and his own analogies and his own exercises which are, he has his very clever exercises which help precipitate this insight.

[01:33:32] But the basic insight was that it very much anchored to visual experience.

[01:33:39] He was looking at the moment he first had it he was looking at the Himalayas at a place called Nagar Kott in Nepal and just looking at this kind of union of snow capped peaks and sky.

[01:33:54] And in his terms he recognized that he had no head.

[01:34:02] This is an insight he also had with reference to this self-portrait that Ernst Mock drew where he once drew a self-portrait which of him lined on a shea's lounge and included his feet and his legs and his torso and his arm.

[01:34:22] But all of it terminated kind of it all kind of approaches the camera I view and there's no head there.

[01:34:29] And anyone can notice that notice this about themselves you look down you see your body but you don't it all sort of terminates upward in a place which is not your head visually speaking.

[01:34:42] Your head is not part of the scene.

[01:34:45] So anyway, Douglas had a very vivid experience of feeling headless and in place of a head there was just the world.

[01:34:55] Yeah.

[01:34:57] And that is a you know it's not exactly the same angle of approach that one takes in Zogchen or in Advaita Vedanta to recognize the selflessness of consciousness but you know I'm convinced that for most people certainly people who are who are practicing and gaining enough mindfulness to notice the difference between being lost and thought and not.

[01:35:24] For most people it's good enough and that this experience of headlessness really is the insight into consciousness that I'm talking about.

[01:35:36] So ultimately one's mindfulness could just be of that of just this centralistness to consciousness.

[01:35:43] Now I'm sure there are people who can have this experience and it doesn't really land in a very clear way and it's not immediately accessible to them in subsequent moments.

[01:35:52] But the reason why I talk about it to the extent I do is that I do think it's super useful.

[01:36:00] But one thing I should say is this is a great point of contact to science and traditional philosophy and our western conversation about this is that other people have noticed Harding and my friend Dan Dennett and Douglas Hofstetter who I don't know but who's obviously a very famous cognitive scientist.

[01:36:20] Author of Go De Lecherbach one of my favorite books.

[01:36:24] Yeah and so they wrote a book together called The Mind's Eye and in that book they're discussing various ideas and errors around you know the thinking about the mind and the self and they I don't know how they got to Harding but they stumbled upon his book they just single him out for derision right like this is and so I just want to read you I just pulled this up I want to read you.

[01:36:50] What this is now Douglas Hofstetter writing I'm sure with with Dan's approval.

[01:36:58] So this is what this is what Hofstetter said about the experience that Harding describes in a really beautiful and articulate way and for anyone who's had this experience for anyone who's really who understands the project of meditation has tried to meditate and then and certainly for anyone who's done that and had this experience.

[01:37:20] Of headlessness it's just you know there's not a bit of woo or irrationality in Harding's passage at all right just pure empiricism and Hofstetter's reflection on it is quote.

[01:37:36] We've here been presented with a charmingly childish and solipsistic view of the human condition is something that at an intellectual level offends and appalls us can anyone sincerely entertain such notions without embarrassment.

[01:37:49] Yet to some primitive level in us it speaks clearly that is the level at which we cannot accept the notion of our own death.

[01:37:56] Yeah that's what's fascinating at the level of just you know our ideas and our discussion about the mind you know rationally scientifically philosophically is that it's possible for two smart guys like like Dan and and.

[01:38:13] And Hofstetter to so totally miss Harding's point.

[01:38:18] It's just like it's just catastrophically so right they have no idea what he's talking about and he's and to my eye he's given them every opportunity to understand what he's talking about and so this is a this is a schism intellectually that you know I've talked about various ways for a long time but it really this this crystallized it to.

[01:38:40] An amazingly satisfying degree.

[01:38:43] Yeah that's I mean especially given that the whole point of it is you are rediscovering a certain level of innocence in how you understand your experience and the world that is his point.

[01:38:56] The reason I think it's very continuous with what you are describing about the self in the app is this idea that there's no you beyond the contents of your consciousness.

[01:39:09] That's it that's all there is and when your eyes are open and you are observing the world in addition to sounds and sensations and feelings you're also seeing the world and you say this a lot.

[01:39:25] There's no you that's inside two pairs of eyes that that is looking out at it.

[01:39:30] That's just it.

[01:39:31] It's this is who you are is your conscious experience.

[01:39:37] It's they're identical.

[01:39:39] So am I right that that's how you understand what the self is or a non illusory self is it is just identical to everything that we're experiencing consciously.

[01:39:56] Yeah I would with a couple of caveats and that one is that there are uses of the term self to which I don't object at all.

[01:40:05] I mean it's just it's just natural to talk about the self in autobiographical terms and to say that the self is an illusion is not the same thing as saying that people are illusions right.

[01:40:19] I'm not saying that people don't exist and I'm not saying I'm certainly not saying that consciousness has nothing to do with the body or you know I'm not I'm not prejudging any of the metaphysical questions about what you know how consciousness arises and the self that is illusory and the self that most people feel they have or most people to which most people feel identical.

[01:40:42] Is the sense of being a subject in the middle of experience you know so that people don't feel that you know as a matter from the first person side there is simply experience they feel like they are having an experience.

[01:40:59] The thing to which it is happening.

[01:41:00] Yeah.

[01:41:01] They're they're appropriating it and they're the you know there in some sense they are looking over their own shoulder or there or they're looking you know they're looking out from.

[01:41:12] They're behind their face you know they don't feel like you don't feel identical to your face you know you feel like you have a face but you are something that's behind your face looking out at the world that's other than yourself.

[01:41:22] And that's the starting point for everyone and that's the and that's the place from which people begin to meditate and so you know most people close their eyes and the moment you close your eyes.

[01:41:33] You feel like you know you've sort of shut the world out to the world's out there and you're in in your head behind your eyelids and now you can now when I tell you to pay attention to the breath.

[01:41:44] The breath appears whether you whether you focus at the tip of the nose or or at your the rising and falling of your abdomen wherever you point your attention.

[01:41:57] You feel like you're pointing your attention from this locus of consciousness in the head to some sensations that are some distance from what you are as the subject who's paying attention.

[01:42:09] And that is the illusory cell that sense that there's this unchanging center in the middle of consciousness.

[01:42:21] That it can point attention and that can be that the source and this is where the free will conversation comes in and it can be the source of intentions of you know an axe of will.

[01:42:34] That's the thing that that gets put into question and ultimately banished by paying close enough attention to what consciousness is like.

[01:42:46] There's a that's kind of what I was talking about when I was saying the feeling that that I'm being dislodged that that you are kicking that sense that central sense of self out of me and and I like I have to do that.

[01:43:03] And I think that if you admit it can be uncomfortable because I find solace in my my sense of self.

[01:43:12] I find solace in that in identifying with that this thing that is experiencing everything and that is the same person from from one time to another.

[01:43:22] It's just I would question that I would you might I know you think you do but I think you're probably if you pay closer attention I think you would find that you don't because it's just look at all the things you like to do.

[01:43:37] And and when they're when you do them in the most the most rewarding way or when you experience as much reward as you can from those things.

[01:43:48] I think you'll notice that you know anything like a flow state or anything like a a true truly being captivated by the thing you're paying attention to entails this loss of self but it's a loss of self that it goes unnoticed and that you can only notice retrospectively.

[01:44:10] I mean it's like if you're watching your favorite movie the most the most the most satisfying experience of watching that movie is full loss of self consciousness while doing it.

[01:44:23] You don't want to be continually reminded that you're just looking at light on a wall or pixels on a screen.

[01:44:28] You just you actually want to be completely absorbed and that complete absorption is is I would argue a loss of this the sense of being located behind your eyes.

[01:44:39] So okay so hear me out for a little bit because I actually am totally open to the possibility that that that you're right and I think that I impact Amrong in this resistance but at the same time.

[01:44:52] There are parts of me that for instance to get back to the discussion of your your kids getting older.

[01:44:59] Right.

[01:45:00] There are times when I exactly don't want that mindless state of flow because what I want is to remember the moment so well that I am explicitly saying you are David Pizarro this is the year 2019 this is a conversation you're having with your daughter soak it all in that this is happening to you Dave.

[01:45:20] And yeah and I find that when I go out of my way to do that my memories I don't regret so much that I wasn't paying you know paying attention.

[01:45:29] I don't know.

[01:45:30] I don't know if there's a distinction there to be made but if anything being dissolved of the self is exactly to me more like what you said about being reminded that that I am watching light bouncing off of a screen.

[01:45:45] Hmm.

[01:45:47] Does that make sense.

[01:45:49] Yeah.

[01:45:50] I think I see what you're you're getting out there and what you're expressing me certainly in in a Buddhist framework is a kind of attachment.

[01:46:00] I mean it feels like attachment to to you know keeping certain good parts of life that you are reluctant to see change and fade away.

[01:46:11] And I mean this impulse to hold on to vivid memories.

[01:46:15] Yeah.

[01:46:16] It's an understandable one but I mean this this gets back to the the Buddha's teachings around Dukka it is it is not a reliable source of well being.

[01:46:25] Yeah.

[01:46:26] Right because your memories fade and the the act of entertaining them is so tenuous.

[01:46:33] I mean they're just they're just images in the mind these these fleeting images that that as we know are totally unreliable and what I find uncanny now are even perfectly reliable images.

[01:46:47] The the videotapes we have of our daughters growing up when I look at those when I look at the my best effort to capture a memory.

[01:46:58] You know perfectly accurately and unchanging for all time.

[01:47:03] I find that an experience that is again uncanny because it doesn't it doesn't serve as a real memory for me anymore.

[01:47:13] I look at these look at these babies I have two daughters you know one's five and one's ten when I look at video when they were you know one and two and and even three.

[01:47:25] They are so different from who they are now that like it's like it is not even rewarding to see the video it is a strange experience.

[01:47:35] Well it's it's poignant though I don't know like I feel David's point here in one sense right when you say it's not a reliable source of well being in some sense it is and and I wouldn't want to lose the attachment to my relationship.

[01:47:55] No no no yeah so I'm like this is this is a problem that I've had with stoicism sometimes but for whatever reason I haven't associated with mindfulness is and the loss of attachment even though there's obviously a lot of overlap but.

[01:48:09] But yeah it's it's in diminishing your attachments part of some of these attachments are what make life worth living in the first place and I don't see think that you're denying that right.

[01:48:20] Well I mean so there's no way around the fact that the.

[01:48:25] The ultimate success of this project is.

[01:48:30] When described can sound strange and in certain ways undesirable right so and I you know I'm not pointing to myself as someone who has taken this this process to its ultimate conclusion I'm not you know.

[01:48:46] My mindfulness is by no means perfect I am I'm lost in thought certainly most of the time you know I'm not a Buddha.

[01:48:56] And yet I have had certain experiences that I can that that are fairly unusual even among meditators and I can talk about them with authority but the.

[01:49:08] There's no question that the prospect of being perfectly established in non dual mindfulness you know permanently without a head.

[01:49:20] And permanently without the capacity to be lost in thought where where as it's described in the Zogchen tradition as with thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house right there's nothing for them to steal so that if you actually become the empty house where there's just a.

[01:49:37] There's no place for thoughts to land.

[01:49:40] That is a kind of person hood that may be incompatible with having a special attachment to one's kids but then but then the question is what what are you actually experiencing I you know what is described in those you know certainly in the texts around that and what many of us have experienced.

[01:50:02] In peak states of meditation or even on you know drugs like MDMA is our states of unconditional love for all sentient beings I mean that's a possible.

[01:50:16] I'm quite sure that's a possible state of consciousness and there's certainly a way to argue that that's ultimately more desirable than merely loving your friends and family members and not caring too much about strangers.

[01:50:31] But it does it certainly can sound undesirable when when one is in just in fact you know mightly attached to and focused on one's one's family right but there is there's no question.

[01:50:46] I mean just look at it ethically anyway we've talked about this on on a prior podcast about one's special attachment to one's own kids in.

[01:50:58] When juxtaposed to all the good one could do in the world with all the the rest of suffering humanity so that you know how am I going to spend the rest of my day well if you told me it doesn't happen to be true today but if you told me that you know my daughter's birthday was totally.

[01:51:16] Tomorrow and I hadn't bought her a present well then I might spend you know the next two hours trying to figure out you know what you know.

[01:51:24] What you know crappy piece of plastic made in China you know I need to buy her right you know it's like something that really is unimportant and if no matter how you look at it right but you know I she's my daughter I love her I want her to be happy it's her birthday.

[01:51:38] You know connect all those dots dots and I'm going to the toy store to shop for some you know brightly colored crap it's all too natural isn't it's inevitable given how we're tending to live but there really is a place to stand.

[01:51:52] Where it seems.

[01:51:55] More ethical and more wise to put that whole project into question and say is this really the best use of your time given the opportunity to alleviate suffering in this world buying her a brightly colored piece of crap from China might not be the best use of.

[01:52:15] I was putting a little top spin on it but but spending time with her that where you could be you know devoting that time towards raising money for charitable causes but spending time with them going on a hike or or.

[01:52:29] Sure you know like those things are precious and no but even the crap is precious I mean playing just doing Legos and here that's the crap I had in mind right so do so doing Legos with with my five year old daughter.

[01:52:42] That's just an awesome use of my time I love it she loves it it's no it's fantastic but there's.

[01:52:49] Again it's like if you told me there's another child I could do that with today yeah right I would be uninterested.

[01:52:58] Like I'm too busy I don't have I don't have an hour to spend with somebody else's kid.

[01:53:04] To play Legos right because I've got all these things I want to do that strike me as more important uses of my time there is something that this special attachment can be challenged and I think there's there's probably a lot of people who are.

[01:53:18] Probably some degree to which it could be relaxed.

[01:53:23] Which we would all recognize as being psychologically and morally healthier.

[01:53:31] It's just it's just possible not to notice what you're not to know what you're missing in this space and I think that the most important aspect of this though is again comes back to suffering in the end of suffering if you it's like you're.

[01:53:43] You find yourself in a position where you're suffering.

[01:53:47] And the question is how much do you want to suffer and you know I think we're all the three of us are in a place where we wouldn't want to be completely without suffering because that seems incompatible with love right you tell me my daughter died and I but my mindfulness is so good that I'm not suffering.

[01:54:07] Okay that's that seems somehow like a cold a cold to sack I don't want to be in right you know that's like you're telling me my mind my mindfulness has made me a psychopath on some level.

[01:54:19] Have ever I've never experienced that kind of detachment from you know ordinary emotions and I've certainly experienced you know my my my experience among great you know meditation masters has not been one of meeting cold and and perfectly detached people.

[01:54:40] I mean that these are for the most part very joyful very engaged people who and many of whom I've seen you know spontaneously weep but you know often from you know come joy and compassion you know when interacting with other people so it's not it's not like there's you become a stone Buddha.

[01:55:01] The more you meditate right you have to live in this world like I don't you know I the way that my naive mind understands it is that you sort of you destroy and you rebuild on a different foundation right it's like whatever you know you realize the tea ceremony is just a tea ceremony but but you still have tea.

[01:55:21] Have tea I don't know.

[01:55:22] I right it strikes me that that can be a balance brought it is a little paradoxical though to go into this kind of practice or the sake of reducing my own suffering and coming out on the other side thinking focusing on on my own experience is wrong headed.

[01:55:44] But the question is what does that mean and so for most people it's synonymous with also being a better parent a better friend a better spouse because your unhappiness is toxic.

[01:55:59] Right like your the thing you notice is that your anger and your insecurity your anxiety just bleeds into everyone else's experience you're constantly expressing it you're communicating it somehow you're judging people because they're.

[01:56:15] They're making you uncomfortable you know and your you're not good company right so it's a it's a it's it may sound selfish to want to reduce your own suffering but when you think of how you can be better for the people you love most in the world to say nothing of the.

[01:56:30] The strangers who also have to interact with you out in public.

[01:56:35] It's it's of a piece with being truly selfless and you're there's it's not zero sum you really.

[01:56:41] Yeah I mean if they can focus if I I mean it is a little paradoxical because one of the things one of my goals is to be able to deepen the time that I spend with the people that I love and when I'm spending it with them that's what I'm focused on I'm not thinking about what somebody said on Twitter and I'm not.

[01:57:04] Thinking about you know what I what happened earlier that day or what's going to happen tomorrow or or anything like that I am focused on what we're doing right now.

[01:57:17] It's with them you know it's with these people and that's that's important to me and so it would be a kind of a sad irony if it ended up diminishing my attachment to those people which I was in some sense trying to deepen or at least improve the quality of our.

[01:57:38] Day to day interactions.

[01:57:41] Well yeah so those I think can be quite distinct attachment is not synonymous with quality in fact attachment is the thing that.

[01:57:52] I would say reliably reduces quality because it just so quality is is a matter of attention and and freedom on your side right so you're free of sorry just be a picture.

[01:58:07] You know what's like to have your your daughter or son if you have one come home from school right so yeah and you're talking to her about how how the day went and you know what you did you know how was the test and all of that stuff.

[01:58:22] You know what's going to make this a perfectly satisfying experience.

[01:58:27] And wearing you are exactly the kind of father you want to be and you get all the feedback that you are that type of father from your daughter.

[01:58:40] And what's going to make it a lousy experience and attachment is not going to at least in in most senses of that term is going to bias it toward the lousy right.

[01:58:57] I mean just think of all the ways in which your attachment your special attachment to your child can make you.

[01:59:05] You know judgmental and impatient and worry about the kind of person they're going to become right you're putting pressure on them that is completely pointless.

[01:59:16] You're communicating conditional love rather than unconditional love like all of it all goes sideways based on those variables whereas if you just I mean if you're really in touch with what a miracle it is to just be standing in front of this person.

[01:59:32] Who you who's sharing your life and you're in touch with just how much you love her and how beautiful that moment is.

[01:59:41] It's a very different type of attention and it's really it's the thing is you can't hold on to it right.

[01:59:48] Right.

[01:59:49] All you can do is have it again in the next moment be based on your your free attention.

[01:59:55] And this is why mindfulness is a kind of panacea because it is it's not a matter of holding on to this thing that you can't possibly hold on to.

[02:00:04] It's a matter of giving the next moment whatever it is your full attention and Tampler maybe if we got to that level we could be more polyamorous and compersive.

[02:00:20] Hey guys I completely forgot I have a heart out at four in 15 minutes to take my daughter somewhere.

[02:00:26] Well now you don't need to.

[02:00:29] Could be taking somebody else's.

[02:00:33] Now you can be the psychopath who stands up your daughter because you had to do a podcast.

[02:00:39] So maybe we should talk about this idea of dissolution of self you say you've had these experience both on psychedelics I take it but also not.

[02:00:50] Yeah well so the usual experience as a meditator is that you see you're you look into that you're told that the self might be an illusion and that if you pay attention to experience it in this rigorous way you might notice that

[02:01:08] and people often have experience brief experiences where in you know they're paying attention to the breath say which is a very common technique to start with and you know for the longest time it feels like you know they're up there in their head struggling to pay attention to the breath.

[02:01:28] But there can be brief experiences where they're paying such close attention to the breath that for brief moments there's just the breath right there's no observer and thing observed.

[02:01:41] There's just breathing right there's just this there's a union of consciousness with its object and then that moment goes away and immediately thoughts come online you think okay well that was it.

[02:01:55] Oh that was it okay how do I get back I did it right yeah yeah I did it yeah it's working it's working yeah and people can have that experience you know many many times hundreds of times thousands of times.

[02:02:08] But it can feel it's transitory and it can feel like it it's totally haphazard when it comes right so I got like this you can't make it happen on demand.

[02:02:20] It's just the kind of thing that you have to create the conditions for and the conditions are concentration and and and you know this deliberate effort to pay attention.

[02:02:29] And that's one stage of mindfulness practice and that stage I think persists for far too long for most people right I mean that was true each yeah yeah that was true of me for years and it was true of me even after I had spent something like a full-time.

[02:02:50] Full year on silent retreat right I done retreats of you know 10 days long or you know three months long and even after basically a year of that.

[02:03:01] You know it was still not true of me to say that that every moment of mindfulness was a moment of selfless of being aware of the selflessness of consciousness.

[02:03:15] Which is to say I couldn't take selflessness itself as the object of my mindfulness I couldn't I couldn't notice that that quality of consciousness on demand.

[02:03:26] And it wasn't until I started practicing the Zogchen practice which is a Tibetan practice that I was able to do that and that's the paradox of Zogchen practice is that it is a practice I mean it is something that you then practice you then do but.

[02:03:44] You can't start it until you can actually just recognize this about consciousness on demand I mean that is what that's where it starts I mean the ordinary mindfulness practice can start anywhere you happen to be which is you know you're just thinking that maybe meditation is worth looking into.

[02:04:04] And I tell you to pay attention to your breath and there you go there you've started now you're meditating doesn't matter where you are you can there's a starting point that's available to.

[02:04:13] Anyone.

[02:04:15] But with Zogchen you actually can't start until you can notice that consciousness has no center and then then the practice is to be mindful of that so I've been both sorts of people I've been the I've been the person who you on psychedelics or on retreat or in in my daily practice.

[02:04:34] I've had this spontaneous loss of self.

[02:04:39] And then I've been struggling to get back to that and then I've been then I eventually became the kind of person for whom mindfulness was synonymous with.

[02:04:50] It being obvious that there is no self in the center of conscious but to be clear that's not the end of that's not so called full full enlightenment that's not that's the beginning of some other process that's not.

[02:05:05] It's not a permanent state because again as I said I spend most of my time lost in thought right so the moments when I'm lost in thought.

[02:05:13] I'm just like you know an ordinary person who's not meditating but the difference is the moment I become mindful.

[02:05:23] My mindfulness is synonymous with the loss of that feeling of self.

[02:05:28] So I can continually punctuate my ordinary neurosis with this experience of centerlessness and that it really matters because it is it is the true corrective to the dream of suffering that was.

[02:05:52] Present fully present a moment ago.

[02:05:55] And so it does become a it becomes a is a real antidote to negative emotion because you know if you can do that in the midst of anger or any other negative emotion it really does undercut it in and if it undercuts its basis fundamentally and one of the landmarks of successful mindfulness practice is to just actually.

[02:06:19] Get off the ride.

[02:06:23] Of negative of emotion quickly you know it's like if someone if you're if you're having a bad reaction to something and you're really wound up you know if your wife or somebody turns to you and says okay stop being angry right now.

[02:06:38] Right like right your life if your life depends on you no longer being angry 10 seconds from now can you do that.

[02:06:45] Right most people can't do that it actually is not that's not quite true most people can do it but they just don't know they can do it like they can be.

[02:06:53] Just an example that that was made vivid to me at one point is that.

[02:06:58] I think I was you know wound up about something and but then I got a call a phone call I had to take and it was you know from somebody with whom I could not download my my you know emotional life at all it was like a business call or like I just had to actually be a normal person for this call.

[02:07:17] Rather than complaining about what just happened.

[02:07:19] And I just noticed the effortlessness of the shift where you know the phone rang I picked it up somebody who did not want to hear about my neurotic bullshit was on the other end of the line.

[02:07:30] And I could just instantly transition into a normal conversation wherein the actual negative emotions completely dissipated and would then have to be picked up again when the call was over.

[02:07:42] And I think most people recognizing themselves that they have that capacity but you know to be able to do it on demand when you're you know it is something you actually can do once you know truly know how to meditate.

[02:07:56] So in the little time I have left can I ask you that general question of you you do you do seem pretty good at maintaining this this even keel emotionally.

[02:08:09] And and I'm just I'm very curious to know as to whether you were like this before you started this practice meditation or or has this drastically improved the way that you handle these things and I can't help but bring up that classic clip of Ben Affleck getting mad at you because in the face of that yelling I don't know how I could have kept my composure.

[02:08:35] Well, I'm not.

[02:08:38] I experience every emotion I've ever experienced is just the half life is cut way down.

[02:08:46] So it's you know I get angry all the time I get anxious all the time.

[02:08:50] I mean it's always that stuff is always happening to me but the moment I notice it in the moment the moment it becomes intense enough so that it captures my attention like this over here.

[02:09:04] Okay, this is suboptimal to be this way.

[02:09:08] Then it then I can let go of it you know so I can I can decide you know how angry I want to be or you know whether I want to still be motivated by the it's a bit of a paradox here because yeah these are useful emotions.

[02:09:25] It's not that I think you would you want to be perfectly free of anger and fear and classically negative emotions because they're their signals about something in the world which and they're energizing right.

[02:09:37] I think it's appropriate to feel moral outrage and so so the kind of the punctate intrusion of negative emotion into our lives isn't necessarily bad but the question is how long do you want to keep it alive by ruminating about it.

[02:09:55] How how wound up do you want to be a half hour later and you know meditation does give you the ability at least a certain point to decide me gives me again this is no concession to the free will debate but it gives you it gives you a kind of skill right that you can you can actually.

[02:10:18] You can do something that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do which is just decide.

[02:10:24] To let go of a whole complex and thought and and reactivity that is has been making you feel miserable.

[02:10:34] That's yeah that's that's great to know but I want to just clear clarify this with you we can title the this episode Sam Harris believes in free will.

[02:10:45] Last question I'm wondering how open you are to a kind of I don't know if you call it panpsychism or something where the fundamental thing is consciousness rather than matter given how much you emphasize that our only evidence is conscious experience.

[02:11:12] That is the thing that is that seems to be underlying everything from our perspective in terms of how we connect with with the world and you know in our earlier conversation you were saying you didn't want to prejudge the relationship between matter and the mind.

[02:11:33] You were agnostic for the purposes of what you are saying about that but I'm wondering gun to your head about the metaphysics of what's going on which way you lean are you purely materialist and you just figure that at some point we're going to figure out how this happens or are you more open to.

[02:11:55] The metaphysical reality be something different than the normal physicalist scientific way of understanding it.

[02:12:04] No I'm definitely open to it I think I'm just agnostic about it I don't know what would be different if certain forms of panpsychism were true or what would seem different and I certainly wouldn't expect.

[02:12:22] Course grained material objects to behave differently right you know if there was something that it was like to be an electron say.

[02:12:31] And I so I'm really you know I just I don't know what would what falsifiable statement could be put forward that would decide the matter.

[02:12:41] So I may be agnostic in a pretty deep sense in that that I would I could be easily convinced that this the difference here is unknowable.

[02:12:50] Right.

[02:12:51] Whether there's some kind of neutral monism that that would would give us a different language with wish to talk about the mind body problem.

[02:12:59] I don't know I'm as you know I'm very convinced that the hard problem really is a hard problem.

[02:13:03] Yeah.

[02:13:05] But my wife on a super open to panpsychism she's wrote this book about consciousness.

[02:13:12] This coming out in a few weeks and she you know she defends she didn't go so far as to.

[02:13:18] You know throw her lot in with panpsychism entirely but she she gives it a fairly proper defense and it is it's interesting to just question why it's so counterintuitive and why you feel that you have the intuition that.

[02:13:33] The world couldn't possibly be that way.

[02:13:36] But yeah I don't I'm just you know agnostic and.

[02:13:43] I'm not sure what would decide the matter.

[02:13:46] Yeah that's interesting you know some of the other views that you hold.

[02:13:53] Would seem like someone might predict if they didn't know this other side of you that you would be a kind of den it like materialist maybe even an alimnivist about consciousness.

[02:14:04] Right.

[02:14:05] And that that clearly is not what's going on the opposite of an alimnivist when it comes to.

[02:14:13] Yeah no no I'm possibly an alimnivist with respect to everything else.

[02:14:18] Yeah you know it's like that my line is that consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion.

[02:14:25] And that's a it's not quite it's a semi Cartesian starting point but it's not quite the it's not it's not what Descartes is usually taken to mean in any case.

[02:14:38] So because he's defining a self that's doing yeah or he certainly seems to be yeah yeah he seems to be.

[02:14:46] All right well thank you Sam this has been totally very informative I think different than some of other other conversations in a good way.

[02:14:55] Yeah well no fighting we didn't fight this time.

[02:14:58] No next time we have some stuff to fight about there's some intellectual dark web stuff that I'm sure we disagree about but.

[02:15:07] Don't be so sure well maybe maybe we do but I'm not as you may know I'm not the biggest fan of the term and it's always been sort of tongue in cheek from my point of view but.

[02:15:21] Yeah other people take it more seriously.

[02:15:23] No I believe that thanks Sam for coming on really appreciate it.

[02:15:27] Yeah yeah always an honor and fun.

[02:15:55] Brains and you have.

[02:16:03] Anybody can have a brain.

[02:16:07] You're a very bad man.

[02:16:09] And a very good man just a very bad wizard.