Dr. Sam Harris: Using Meditation to Focus, View Consciousness & Expand Your Mind
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm ander huberman and am a professor of neurobiology and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine today. My guest is doctor sam Harris. Doctor's sam Harris did his undergraduate training in philosophy at stanford university and then went on to do his doctor in neuroscience at the university of california, los Angeles.

He is well known as an author who has written about everything from meditation to consciousness, freewill, and he holds many strong political views that he voiced on social media and in the content of various books as they relate to philosophy in neuroscience. During today's episode, I mainly talk to doctor Harris about his views and practices related to meditation, consciousness and free will. In fact, he made several important points about what a proper meditation practice can accomplish.

Prior to this episode, I thought that meditation was about deliberately changing one's conscious experience in order to achieve things such as deeper relaxation, a heighten sense of focus or ability to focus, generally elevated memory and so on. What sam taught me, and what you'll soon learn as well, is that while meditation doesn't deed hold all of those valuable benefits, the main value of a meditation practice, or perhaps the greater value of a meditation practice, is that IT doesn't just allow one to change their conscious experience. But I actually can allow a human being to view consciousness itself, that is, to understand what the process of consciousness is.

And in doing so, to profoundly shift the way that one engages with the world and with oneself in all practices, all environments and at all times, both in sleep and in waking states, and in that way, making meditation perhaps the most potent and important portal by which one can access novel ways of thinking and being and viewing one's life experience. We also discuss the so mind body problem and issues of duality and free will, concepts from philosophy and neuroscience that, fortunately, thanks to valuable experience and deep thinking on the part of people like doctor sam Harris and others, is now leading people to understand really what freewill is and isn't, where the locus of freewill likely sits in the brain, if IT indeed resides in the brain at all, and what that means to be a conscious being, and how we can modify our conscious states in ways that allow us to be more functional. We also discuss perception, both visual perception, auditory perception, and especially interesting to me, I think, as well, hopefully to you, time perception, which we know is very elastic in the brain, the literal frame rate by which we process our conscious experience can expand and contract dramatically depending on our state of mind and how conscious we are about our state of mind.

And so we went deep into that topic as well. Today's discussion was indeed an intellectual deep dive into all the topics that I mention a few moments ago, but IT also included many practical tools. In fact, I pushed sam to share with us what his specific practices are and how we can all arrive at a clear and Better understanding of a meditation practice that we can each and all apply, so that we can derive these incredible benefits, not just the ones related to stress and focus and enhanced memory, but the ones that relate to our consciousness, that is, to our deep sense of self, into others.

Several times during today's episode, I mention the waking up APP. The waking up APP was developed by sam Harris, but I want to emphasize that my mention of the APP is in no way I paid promotional. Rather, the waking up APP is one that i've used for some period of time now and find very, very useful.

Our family members that also use IT, other staff members here, the huberman lab podcast, use IT because we find IT to be such a powerful tool. Sam has generator offered huberman lab podcast listeners a thirty day, completely free trial of the waking up APP. If any, if you want to try that, you can simply go to waking up dot com slash human to get that thirty day free trial.

During today's discussion, we didn't just talk about meditation, consciousness and free will. We also talked about psychiatrically, both their therapeutic applications for the treatment of things like depression in P, T, S D, but also the use of psychic alex. And we discuss sams experiences with psychiatric as they relate to expanding one's consciousness.

I also asked sam about his views and practices related to social media, prompted in no small part by his recent voluntary decision to close down his twitter account. So we talked about his rationale doing that, how he feels about doing that. I think you will find that to be very interesting as well.

Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electoral light drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of salt, magnesium in patashie, this so called electoral tes.

And no sugar, salt, magnesium and potassium are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electro lights need to be present in the proper ratios. And we now know that even slight reductions in electronic concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits. And cognitive and physical performance element contains a science back to electronic ratio of one thousand milligrams that one gram of sodium, two hundred milligrams of plastic um and sixty milligrams of magnesium.

I typically drink element first thing in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrates my body and make sure I have enough electroliers and while I do any kind of physical training, and after physical training as well, especially if i've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element that's element dot com slash huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that drink element L M T dot com slash huberman and now for my discussion with doctor sam Harris. Doctor sam Harris, you're just talking about this. You are indeed a doctor.

I cannot save your life, but I, I, I might save. You are not existent soul if we .

talk long of well, neither of us are clinical, but we are both brain explorer from the different perspectives, some overlapping yeah. And i'm really excited to have this conversation. I've been listening to your voice for many years, learning from you for many years.

And I be remiss if I didn't say that my father, who is also a scientist, is an enormous fan of your waking up APP and has spent a lot of time over the last few years. He's in his late seventies. He is almost eighty.

The theorem dal for assist, walking to the partner here, his apartment, and spending time meditating with the APP, or sometimes separate from the APP, but using the same sort of meditations in his yeah talks back and forth and even, I shouldn't say even, but yes, even in his late seventies, says reported that IT is significantly shifted his awareness of self and his conscious experience of things happening in and around him. And he was somebody who I think already saw him self as a pretty aware person, thinking about, you know, quantum mechanics and in the rest. So thank you from him directly.

Thank you for me now directly. And I really want to use that as a way to frame up what I think is one of the more interesting questions, and not just science and philosophy and psychology, but all of life, which is, what is this thing that we call self? Far as I know, we have not localized the region in the brain that can entirely account for our perception of self.

Their areas, of course, IT regulate proprio exception in our awareness of where our limbs are in space, maybe even our awareness of where we are in physical space. There are such circuses we both know. yeah.

But when we talk about sense of self, I have to remember this kind of neuroscience, one or one thing that we always say, you know, when you teach memory, you say, you know, you wake up every morning and you remember who you are, you know who you are. Most people do, even if they lack memory systems in the brain, for whatever reason, pretty much everyone seems to know who they are. What are your thoughts on what that whole thing is about? How do we come into the world feeling that way? I appreciate answers from the perspective of any field, including their science.

The big question, the problem is we we use the term self in so many different ways, right? And and there's one sense of that term, which is the target of meditation and the target of deconstruction by the practice in by interesting any surround in philosophy so you'll hear and you hear from me that this self is an illusion, right? And that is a psychological freedom that can be experienced on the other side of discovering IT to be an illusion. Um and some people don't like that framing and some people would would insist that is not so much an illusion but it's it's a construct and is not what IT seems right um but it's not that every use of the term self is illegitimate and they're certain types of selves that are not illusory. You not saying that people are illusions.

I'm not saying that you can't um uh talk about yourself as distinct CT to yourself as as the whole person and as psychological continue with your past experience as being distinct from the person and psychological continuity of some other person, right? Because obviously we have to be able to conserve of those data is not fundamental mysterious that you're going to wake up tomorrow morning and still being psychologically continuous with your past and not my past right? And and you know if we swapped lives, you know that would do know demand some explanation um so the elusive ss of the self doesn't cut against any of those obvious facts.

So the sense of self that is a Lucy um and again, we might want to talk about our self and other modes because there's just a lot of interest. They're psychologically, ultimately, scientifically. The the thing that doesn't exist uh is certainly does not exist as IT seems that I would I would want to argue that IT actually is just a proper illusion um is the the sense that there is a subject interior to experience in addition to experience.

So most people feel like they're having an experience of the world and they're having their experience of their bodies in the world. And and in addition to that, they feel that they are a subject internal to the body, very likely in the head. Most people feel like there behind their face as a kind of locus of awareness and thought and intention, and and that almost like they are your passenger inside your body.

You know, most people don't feel identical to their body is, and they can imagine this. This is. So the origin, the psychological origin, the the four psychological origin of a sense of that there there might be a soul that survive the death of the body.

I mean, most people are, are what my friend paul bloom calls common sense dualists, right? You, you, you just the default expectation seems to be that whatever the relationship between the mind and the body, there's this there's some promise of separability. They are right at the and whenever you really push hard on the science side, say one, one of the mind is really just what the brain is doing that begins to feel more and more counter intuitive to people.

And there still seems some, some residual at death. Maybe something is going to lift off the brain and go elsewhere, right? So there is a sense of dualism that many people have, and obviously that's supported by many religious beliefs.

But this feeling IT is a very peculiar arts point with the people feel that they don't feel identical to their experience, right? As a matter of experience. They feel like they're on the edge of experience, uh, somehow appropriating IT from the side.

You kind of on the edge of the world and the world is out there. Your body is is in some sense in object in the world, uh, which you know is different from the world. The boundary of your skin is still meaningful.

You can sort of loosely control your body and you can control you can control of your growth and subtle voluntary motor movements. But uh, you can you're not controlling everything your bodies doing. You're not controlling your heart beat and your you know your um hormonal secretions and all of that.

And so there's a lot that's going on that is in the dark for you. And then you you you give someone an instruction to meditate, say and you say, okay, just let's exam in all of this from the first person side. Let's look for this thing you're calling I and again, I is not identical to the body.

People feel like their hands are out there and they're good. If they going to meditate, they are going to close their eyes very likely. And they are going to pay attention to something.

They are going to pay tension to the breath or the sounds and it's from the point of view of being a locus of attention that is now aiming attention ratigan ally at an object like the breath um that there's this dualism that is set up and ultimately the ultimate promise of meditation. I mean, there really too levels at which you could be interested in in meditation um one is you know very straight forward and remedial and non paradoxical and very subscribed. And it's the usual set of claims about all the benefits you're going to get for meditation. So you're going to lower your stress and you're increase your focus and you you know stave off critical thin and know there's all kinds of good things that science is, say meditation give you um and none of that entails really drilling down on this paradox, pal, claim that the self is illusion or or anything else of that sort but from my point of view, the real purpose of meditation and his real promise is not in this long list of of benefits not not discounting any of those though you know the science uh for many that is quite provisional um it's in this deeper claim that if you look for this thing you're call an eye, if you look for the sense there's a thinker in addition to the the the mirror rising of the next thought, say you won't find that thing and and you can what's more, you can not find IT in a that's conclusive a and that matters right and IT and IT has a there's a host of benefits that follow from that discovery um which are uh quite a bit deeper and more interesting than engaging meditation on the side of its benefits. Distress in increasing focus and all the rest have .

a number of questions related to what you just said. And first of all, I agree that the evidence that meditation can improve focus, reduce stress, that it's there. It's um not an enormous pile of evidence, but it's growing. And I think that especially for some of the shorter meditations, which I these days view more as perceptual exercises, you know, talk about the silly pycke before, but for those haven't heard of before about perception, you can have extra reception, extending things beyond the confines.

Your skin interaction tion, which is, can also include the surface of the skin, but everything in word and meditation through eyes closed typically um involving some sort of attentional spotlighting something will get into to more interaction tive versus extra acceptive events that that are including thoughts. And so I think of at a basic level meditation as somewhat of a perceptual exercise. You can tell me where you disagree there, and I would expect and hope that that you would.

But I would like to just touch on this idea that you brought up, because a decision, interesting one of this idea that our bodies are containers and that we somehow use ourselves as passengers within those containers. That certainly been my experience. And the image that I have is of, as you say, that is of myself for of people out there that sit A A few centimetres below the surface, or that sit entirely in their head.

And of course, the brain and body are connected through the nervous system. I think sometimes a brain is used to replace a nervous system. And that can get us into trouble in terms of coming up with real, real and definitions. But the point is that there is something special about the real state in the head.

I think for as much as my laboratory and many other scientists are, are really interested in brain body connections through the nervous system, another organ systems that the nerve system bind, that if you cut off of my limbs, i'm going to be different. But i'm fundamentally still Andrew, where as if we were allega couple square millimeters out of my parao cortex um it's an open question as to whether or not I would still seem as much like Andrew to other people into myself even. And so there is something fundamentally different about the real estate in the crane IO volt.

You can even remove both of my eyes. I'd still be Andrew. And those are two pieces of my central other system that are fundamental to my daily life.

But i'd still be me. Whether and this doesn't, I think, just applied a memory systems. I mean, I think there are reasons of the frontal cortex that, when destroyed, have been shown to modify personality and self perception in dramatic ways.

So it's a sort of an obvious point once it's made, but I do think it's worth highlighting because there does seem to be something special about being in the head. The other thing is that sitting a few centimetres below the surface or riding in this container makes sense to me, except that I wonder if you've ever a shift, as I have, when something very extreme happens. Let's use the the negative example of, you know, and you're in a fair state of a sun IT feels as if your entire bodies is you or is me.

And and, and now I need to get this thing, the whole container at in me, to some place of safety, in whatever form. This is also, sure, I think in next static states, yeah, we can feel really, when he will say, embodied. I wonder whether or not we Normally aslant below the surface of our body when I say, oh, I mean, in neural terms and maybe our sensory experience is not truly at the bodily surface but sits below the bodily surface more at the level of organ systems and within our head and then certain things that jot us our automated ic nervous system, into heighten states, bring us into states of um you know bring us closer to the surface and therefore include all of us. Again, I don't want to take us down a mechanistic description of of something that doesn't exist. But does any of that resonate in terms of how you are thinking about are describing the self?

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot there. The first on the point of the brain being, you know that the locus of of what we are as minds yeah, I mean, there are people who will insist that so the whole nervous system has to be thought of as they talking about emotional life and the the the insults connection to a the gut. And you just the sense of of self extends beyond the brain. But I totally take your point that a brain transplant that is a coherent idea, and you would expect to go with the brain rather than with the vira. And um so in that sense we really are the the old philosophical thought experiment of been a brain in a vat mean essentially are already the vat is our school and were virtually in that situation.

Horrible movie. I'm so I can have put you up when I was a teenager, and my sister and I, you, to go to the movies every once and while we trade off, could pick the movie. And SHE took me to see once the movie boxing Helena, the David linch .

film where .

he amputates the limbs of a woman who he's obsessed and keeps her. It's really horrible a film. And about twenty years into, and my sir just turned to me and said, and the question there was whether not too sibling should actually persist in the movie like that, we decided to persist in the movies that we could laugh about IT later.

But IT was rather disturbing. I don't recommend the movie, nor do I recommend seeing IT with a sibling. But in that movie that the woman, he, he takes her as a container and and restricts her movement, right? Quite statistics and horrible thing, really.

David linch interesting mind, perhaps, but the idea was that was the question, how much of the person persists in the absence of their ability to move at set up? Could there be love? Could there be these other affection? Rather extreme example, but one that I that still hunt to me and I am thinking .

about still yeah also but just to follow that point um there's a there's a lot about us that we don't have access to and unless we enact IT physically, like if I ask you, you know do you still know how to ride a bike, right?

There's no place in your memory or you can you can expect, but you just sitting in your chair that you you retained the knowledge of how to write a bike, right? Like as this procedural memory is different from semantic or episode memory, I asked you, do you know you're address? Yes, you can recall your address, you're sitting there.

But if you had had a microstrip neily dissected out your ability to ride a bike, you and left everything else intact, you know, you might think you could buy a bike. But suddenly you stand up next to one, and you have no idea what to do with that. And that would be a discovery that would only happen if you were.

Motoring engaged with that you know object um and i'm sure we could probably come up with a hundred things about us that really seem core to us and we are not separate for our for hood, which seem to only can only get invoked when we are you know out there moving in the world. And we have limbs as etra and but yeah no, it's the seat of of consciousness and me. The right framework to talk about all of this, from my point of view, is consciousness and its contents, right? So we have conscious ness the fact that there's something that is like to be us, right?

The fact that the world and our internal experience is is illuminated, that IT has a quantitative character um and then there's a question of what is that qualities of character? What is you know what kinds of information do we have access to? What does that feel like to be as how do had a different state of arousal change that you talked about fear and and fear can change a lot of things, but uh and you know various neurological deficits or you you can add drugs to the mix.

You have psychic, delicate that radially transform the contents of consciousness. From my point of view, consciousness itself is simply the the cognizance, the awareness that that is the the flood lights by which any of that stuff appears, right? So consciousness doesn't change, but its contents change. And um to come back to meditation for a second, many people think meditation is about changing the contents of consciousness.

You there some some content want to rid of, like anxiety, other contents you want to to encourage, like calm and you know unconditional love and some other you know classically pleasant pro social emotion um and that's all fine as all possible but the real the wisdom of of the two thousand year old wisdom of meditation that really is the tuy center of the tuesday pop is a recognition of what consciousness itself is always already like, regardless of the contents and the changes and contents and this is why and we might talk about this, but this is why they're mutually compatible. Uh, psychic, delicate and meditation for me are somewhat author because psychedelic is all about making wholesale changes to the contents of consciousness and and there's no some wonderful consequences of doing that. There can be some haroon and terrifying consequences of doing that.

But generally speaking, I think you know, use use wisely, they can be incredibly viable. And the thai te potential there is enormous. But the crucial disjunction here is that there really is something to recognize about ordinary waking consciousness, that the conscious ness is compatible with my driving a car to get here on time, right?

You don't have to, you don't have to have the pyo techniques of being on L, S, D to see the the to transcend the central illusion that i'm i'm saying as is the thing to be transcended which is the sense that there is a duality between subject and object in every moment of experience um and to take a back to something you said about just all of our different modes in ordinary life. The interesting thing is I think people are constantly losing their sense of self and they're not aware of IT. And then there there's a um probably an analogy to the visual system here which is um to a visuals, the cards which IT perhaps you have spoken about on your podcast.

Not enough. So please.

Yeah so so what happens with our you know every time we move our eyes is called a second and we do that about three times a second or so just Normally um there is a you know the the region of motor core text that that affects that movement sense was called in an effort copy of that motor movement uh which which is used as information that propagates back to visual cortex, suppresses uh the data of vision while the eyes are moving because otherwise, if you weren't doing that, every time you move your eyes IT would seem like the visual seen itself was lurching around.

And people can experience this for themselves if they just, you know, touch one of the rebels on the side, you know, not all that hard and can giggle IT. You can roll IT around. You can, gigi, from side to side, you can see that A, A, A, A movement of the eyeball that's not governed by your oculus motor system delivers a giggling of the world because it's not your brain is not anticipating in the same way it's not you're not producing that the same a predictive copy of of the movement.

It's a little bit like we have some action sports filming on our staff here that the gingle, you know that holds an iphone like you see the kids or just essa pe org they are hold the phone while moving around.

Are the people who are the vlog ers? Does anyone even still use that moving around into its its image stabilization? Essentially that keeps the the camera study and these are more than camera is, of course, for those list point in my eyes, but they do far more than just what camera would do. But yeah this internal system of image stabilization yeah I can see perhaps where you're going with this that that IT allows us to remain in a self referencing scheme as opposed to um sort paying attention to just how confusing IT is to attract the visual world that some level actually .

where i'm going to that. So people are having this depression of vision three times a second on average and they're not experiencing IT, right? So like like you literally your effectively going blind and you're not noticing IT.

And um this is .

very fast, yes, is very fast. Now there's an analyst h suppression, I would say, of the sense of self that occurs every time attention gets absorbed is significantly in its object, right? So let's even have this concept you have losing yourself in your work or you know you losing the classic flow experiences, have this this quality where there's that and this tends to be why there's so rewarding um where there's just if you're in some an athletic activity or you an aesthetic one and uh or you could be having sex or if you could be whatever is some peak experience, its peak ness usually entails. There have been some brief period where there was no distance between you and the experience, right? For that moment you were no longer looking over your own shoulder or anticipating the next moment or trying to get somewhere where where you warrant or you micro o managing errors or you like know not is just the flow of unity with whatever the you know whatever the experiences you know a surfer on on the wave right um and we love those experiences um and then we are continually abstracted away from them by are thinking about them think, oh my god that was so good or how do I back to that or and you're looking at the sunset is the most beautiful sunset that you ve ever seen and then you're continually interrupted in the experience of merely seen IT with a commentary about how amazing this is. And I wonder what a real estate Prices are here and is a possible that because we could move here and like your your mind is just continually narrow a conversation you're having with yourself how repair aox ics I an you're telling yourselves things yourself things that you already know uh, as though there were two of you rather off and right like you know, you're just, you know i'm looking for which which is the water and I said there IT is right but like i'm the one seen IT who am I saying you know there IT is to is there is someone else who needs to be informed about the thing I already to saw, right? So it's it's there's something about our internal dialogue that is paradoxically.

um is there any um no logic condition um close select to me or or anything like that where somehow people feel more unified with the self on a continual basis. The observer and the actor within whether IT staying more more is as a complete sentence. Is there any known neurological syndrome makes sound like a bad thing, but could be a good thing, whereby people feel that the actor and the observer within them are unified continually.

It's not a pathological one. Made some of them. The work on the default mode network suggest that that at least part of the story, right, the defense mode network, which has been talking about a lot of late, because IT has come up both in the in the meditation literature and in the psychiatric literature, but its original a discovery was that.

And the reason I was called the default mode was that in virtually every no imaging experiment ever run, they found that between tasks, when the brain was just in a default state, these middle line structures would would increase their activity. Uh, and then they would, then they would reliably diminish whenever the person in the scanner was on tasks. And usually that meant some kind of outward looking um individual discrimination task.

I but I could be could be IT, could be visual, could be semantic IT, could be Better attends to be their eyes are open and their paying attention as something that's been broadcast to them through in a monitor goggles um or know that look at a miro that showing them a computer monitor um but so that the general insight was there are these middle line structures in the brain that seem to be increasing their activity when the brain is just kind of idling between tasks waiting for something to happen um and then further experiments found tasks that actually up regulated um activity there be beyond baseline and those tasks seem to be self referential so that when you ask people, you know you give a list of words and you say, would do these these applied to you right you and so people or or you ask people think about um uh actually one experiment I did you know when you're chAllenging people's beliefs are when you're chAllenging beliefs that that have more a personal significance like political or religious beliefs, you get up regulation in these regions is opposed to just generic beliefs about you're in los Angeles, this is a table this something to which, you know, people are not know, holding fast as a matter of identity. So anyway, both meditation and psychiatric seem to suppress activity in these, in these regions, which we know our associated with both self talk, mind wandering and and explicit acts of self representation, right? So could we say .

that they are somewhat autobiographical because they access memory systems and in the way you're describing them, and in the way that a colleague of mine who's been a guests on this pocket, I don't if you interact with them before, but I I could very much enjoy whatever interaction you do. Would have his David speel, he's our associate chairs, psychiatrists.

He and his father, actually his father, then he founded he noses as a valid clinical practice and hip nosis, which is, I will see a heightened sense of attention with deep relaxation, is known to dramatically suppress the the default mode network. He talks about this a lot. And I I always wondered, as we take down activity within the defauts mode network, what surfaces in its place and is what surfaces is in its place? Does that somehow reflect that the two are Normally in a push pull? That's not necessarily the case, right, when I fall a sleep by an hallucination.

But that doesn't mean that during the day my the fact that i'm looking at objects is is what's preventing me from hlubis ating. I close my eyes. I can get imagery.

But there's this kind of A A different illusion, the illusion of tagging sticks. Architect es, sometimes I don't want take us off course, but the default on network seems to want to be there. Code IT IT seems to be fighting for for our attention. And unless we give ourselves a visual, targeted and auditory target or some silent experience of some kind that sounds like and then if i'm surprised to hear that meditation reduces activity in the defauts mode network at some level because meditation to me often times involves paying attention to a some sort of perceptual target. Yeah maybe you could eventually explain us to how I might do .

that or why might yeah story because obviously outward going attention is not um even if you're having the kind of ego ic sacd that i'm talking about where you're like you're actually not clearly aware of of yourself. You're clearly defined in yourself as separate from experience uh for the moment of paying attention you so you are losing yourself in your work that's not the same thing as having the clear meditative insight of selflessness that i'm that i'm claimed IT as the goal of meditation. Um but there is a you to win back to the original point I was making in the reason why I drew the of the analogy to visual C.

I do think there's a continuous interruption in our sense of self that goes unrecognized and but but the conscious acquisition of of of the understanding that the self is illusion is a different experience and it's because you are focusing on this absence. Actually there's another analogy to the visual system that applies here, which is to the the optic blindspot. IT means like so um which is a good energy for me because IT cuts through A A bunch of false assumption is to wear that you would look for this or how this relates to ordinary experience.

So as many people know that we have you know in both eyes we have was called the blindspot, which is a consequence of the optic nerve transit through the retina. Unlike self load D I think, I think sample pods have their optic nerve, as you an opinion being would have engineered IT connecting the retina from the back. And therefore there is no blind. The area of a blind is associated with its transit back through .

the receptions on the outside, exactly the humans, whatever reason, put photos. Well, I would say I wasn't consult the design phase something, put photo reception tors combination of things, put photo reception tors in the back and to the .

high .

way in a through through the pixel center of yeah several pods and just off of basically invertebrates, right? Design is more at its face, logical mam's, very logical design, at least as far .

judgements and is a i'll take IT.

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So any case, we have this blind spot, which you can I think most people learn this in school, although my daughter had not been taught in school. I just show them this for the first like a month ago, which and they were briefly fascinated and they want to return to their screen time. Uh but uh anyway, you can take a piece of paper and you make the two Marks on IT and then you cover one eye and you fix IT on on one mark um me you can look this up online if you need details about how to do this and you about staring at one fixed ation point.

You move the paper back and forth and you can get IT to a place where the other mark disappears and that and you know you can run this experiment long enough to satisfy yourself that there is in fact a blindspot on your visual field which with one eye closed, you don't Normally notice the reason why you have to cover. You cover one eyes because H I compensates for the the blind spot the other so um but which is to say that if you close one eye and and survey the visual scene, something really is missing whatever you're looking at if you're looking at the crowd of people, somebody is missing ahead and you're not noticing IT and it's not is not easy to notice because um you know the brain doesn't tend to vividly represent the absence of information. I mean, it's just like just part of the game is not being rendered is is not showing up as A A break in your in the visual field is just not there and you're um I mean, the people have argued that they say I kind of filling in phenomenon that happens, but I think that can be you know misunderstood or or exaggerated.

But the eye movements themselves you described before because I should say that the the the sacred analogy of about transiently and repetitively racing myself works perfectly here because indeed, microscope, dds, smaller circles, OCR all the time, also prevent eyes from fixating in one location long enough to observer blinds, even if one I close.

So if we, the experiments done with paralytics to essentially lock eyes in one location, basic things just start disappearing. Yeah, just, just, just blind. Those have been done. Human, they're quite terrifying.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But amen, you can do that for yourself. I just IT begins to just off melt in in a warm glow um no psychic delois required. But the the interesting point there is that when you ask yourself, okay, so this because as a consequence of the ice anatomy, there is this this thing you can see that that is absent from your experience. But the question is, where is that in relationship to the rest of you, to your mind, at least that deep within? Or is that some sense right on the surface of experience and there there's expectation that people have again, I think, conflicting meditation with with a search for changes in the context of conscious ness.

They're looking for a much more subbed things to to notice about the mind or much you know faster things to notice um psychiatric sets up this this expectation that you do you know a mass of dose of mushrooms or else and everything changes and you just get the this full you know biotin c vision um and you you get not only visual changes but you emotional changes and you get synthesia where like you're just you have much more mind in in in so many ways um so they begin you you having these experiences or reading the mystical literature you begin to think, okay, well then freedom is is really elsewhere or is is really it's deep within. It's like it's not it's not coincident with the ordinary awareness that that can see this coffee cup clearly and that can just transition attention to you know reading an email or full of priests of just ordinary waking conscious ness. Um but the truth is this insight into self lessons is insight into the non duality of subject and object is as close to ordinary consciousness as this.

Inside into the optic line spot, like where do you have to go to have this inside into the blind spot? You just have to if you go anywhere, you just have to set up the the the experiment correctly such that you know you you can see the data. But the data right on the surface, it's like it's it's it's almost too close to you to notice.

If it's IT all hard to notice, it's because it's so close rather than you know, deeper with the other far away. And there other analogies, like, I don't remember those minds eye pieces of art work, that the random dot stereogram have an image that pops out. I've always find IT very difficult to see those. Could I have you very damn, and I, you know.

but some people, people can't see those. These are these images that you see me at the kind of tourist y shops of people say that there is is the whale and think I don't see that you kids that swim a lot when they're Younger and there I tend to breathe just to one side. I don't know. This was you, this was definitely intend to, will keep one eye close. You set up a pretty strong ocular dominance, advising your vision to one or the other.

Ee, early in life, whether you're learning how to be a bow hunter, or you're learning how to throw darts or shoot billions or anything that involves selectively viewing the world through one, I, for even a couple of hours, can set up a permanent, a symmetry in the waiting of a visual flow, flow visual information from the eyes of the brain. It's reversible, but only through the reverse dynamics of covering up the other eye intentionally. So I actually, I had to be reversed, patched for a while, because I was seeing double, because I lost by nick vision.

I don't stand a chance in hell of seeing an image pop out of a random yeah and which was kind iran because I did my PH on by oar array ri. But nonetheless, people can see these or if they can, what I think they provide a really terrific example of what you're talking about IT as a larger theme, which is that perceptually, you see a bunch of daughter, then all of a sudden, right, what you thought wasn't there, suddenly there, but can disappear again. Or there are certain visual illusions if we were to include others. That once you see them you cannot undo them, right? So there's the faces faces you know figure ground type stuff, you very stable percepts .

yeah by stable .

perception and then their sort of ocular competition, you show two different images to the eyes. Each of the two eyes IT is near impossible for people to perceive them both cy multi eusden yeah um so it's a little bit of what you're describing. I mean, they seem to be fundamental features about the way the neural circuits are organized that they don't want to stability, they don't want to stay fixated on anyone thing for very long. To do so either takes training, intense interest, intense fear, intense excitement, I say intense I guess I come back this idea that the automation ic noval system is somehow governing our ability to um spotlight at anyone location for very long. Does that are useful framework or is that gna take us down .

a different ort of a different path for this? Me for the only point I was making is that the seemingly paradoxical claim that something can be right on the surface and he had hard to see right? So like there are things that are because it's and again, this this this seems to justify the expectation held by, I would think of the vast majority people who get interested in these know spiritual things for lack of Better word um that the truth must somehow be deep within right there's really like there's some distance between where your between the one who is looking and the thing that has to be found, right? And you have to go through this this long evolution of changes and in many metaphors that set this up is like you are the base of a mountain and you have to climb to the top and so you have to find the path.

However, seure secured us to get you there. Um but there really is a distance between where your between your starting point and the goal and what i'm arguing, and this is a kind of non dual going to use a term of jargon um is a non dual approach to meditation as opposed to dalek c one that there really is a the path and the goal are are are coincident right that there's a that you have to unravels the logic by which you would seek something that's outside of know the the present moments experience um you know I E not available really not available to now um because so many things worth having, so many, so many skills worth acquiring, really are not available to you now. So like it's like, you know you want to be A A pianist if you want to speak chinese, you want like like you there's something you don't know and then you want to learn that thing and there's a whole process right and you might not be capable of doing IT, right?

You might end. And real mastery is far away, right? If you if you've never hit a golf ball and you want to hit a golf ball three hundred yard straight, I can pretty much guarantee you're not going to do that initially and you're not going to do IT, you know, on day two and you're not can do IT reliably for the longest time.

And there's real training, you know, in front of you to be able to do that reliably. An insight into and really the core insight, I mean the insight that is the core of you know the budders teaching to take one one historical example of this um really is available now. And IT is not I made you know granted IT can be very hard one for people.

I had probably spent a year on silent retreat one week to three months comments before I sort got the point on making now, right? So like I know it's quite i'm literally in these you know is a retreat. We spend you know twelve, eighteen hours a day just meditating, trying to to on pack the kinds of claims i'm i'm making now. So there is is is possible to rigorously overlook this is possible to stand in front of the minds eye image and stare in a way that is guaranteed not to give you pop out right, and to be to be adept that you know staring in that way. Um so it's possible to be miss LED.

And so what i'm trying to argue here is that there is um is a fair man of leverage you can get with with Better information, which can cut the time course of you are searching for this thing and to cancell your false expectations about just where this is in relation to your ordinary waking consciousness and is possible to get bad information and to have a bunch of experiences, you know, you go, you go and do, and I waska trip and you have is incredibly valuable and is valuable for all the ways in which has changed the contents of your consciousness, startling ways. And you had insights into your past and into your relationships and into wie, not as loving as you might be and there's lots to think about and you're like, but that's all great. That's all something that we can talk about.

But there is is a truly is or sag. no. And if that makes a point of contact to what i'm talking about is really just at one point, I at the point where this sense of subject, object division in consciousness is illusory and vulnerable to investigation.

And if you investigate IT as the the right plane to focus, you know, you pick the analogy you want from, you know, whether it's, you know, setting up the the the optic blind spot experiment and just the right way so that you can see that it's actually not the data is not there or um in the by stable perception is great because you when you see one of these images like the the face face um diagram or you know the domination, you know that this looks like a just a massive dots and then you see the image of a domain g pop out once you see that you really can't unc IT. I mean like once you have the the requite conceptual IT of anchor to IT, then every time you look you're going to find IT again and and eventually becomes effortless. And that's what ultimately meditation is.

I mean that this kind of meditation, you ultimately learn to recognize that there's no separation from you between you and your experience, right? There's not the experience on the one hand and the self on the other. There's just experience, right? There's just seen here in smelling, taste, touching, thinking, feeling, property exception at whatever channels of information you want to that. Um but there's just the there's just the totality of the energy of consciousness and its contents.

And there's no it's not that you're on the river bank uh and this is this is how I can see me in the beginning even when you're practicing meditation fairly diligently can seem like you're on the river bank watching the contents of conscious ness flow by and and meditation is the act of doing that more and more just passionately so you're no longer grabbing at the at the pleasant or pushing the unpleasant away. You're just kind of relaxing and and in the most nonjudgemental frame of mind just witnessing the flow, right? But if you're doing that, dolly cally, you feel like the meditator, you feel like the subject aiming attention.

And so now you're on the river bank watching everything go go pass. But the truth is you are the river right? Experience itself is that there is just experience itself.

You're you're not on the edge of experience and everything you can notice is part of the of the flow, right? And there and there's no point from which you to abstract yourself away from the flow, to stand outside IT and to say, okay, this is, this is my life. This is my experience.

This is my body. Yes, you can do that. I mean, are all just thoughts, but that's more of the flow, right? And so there is a there is a process by which you would ever eventually recognize that there's no distance between you and your experience.

And again, you can you can wait for those moments in life where experience gets so good or so terrifying, just so cillit right. You're make as drive. I ve been so hard, you in a war, and you can't think about anything because you know, the enemies shooting at you. And this is the most drilling video game you ve ever play in your life. H and your life is on the line or your your you know at the peek of of some you know athletic event where that's just you don't know how you're doing the things you're doing but it's all happening automatically, right um but you know those are those are you know one one hundred of one percent of one's life, you know. And what i'm calling meditation is a way of simply understanding the mechanics of attention, whereby you are denying yourself that unity of experience so much at the time and recognizing that that you know it's based on A A misperception of of the way consciousness always already is.

Well, there wasn't an incentive to learn how to meditate properly that was worn in. I've been meditating a fair amount since I was in my teens, but more along the lines of just paying attention to breath and recognize that sort of observer open, observer tight meditation or focus attention. I would suppose more of the focus attention type will get into these a little bit layer, but have a number of questions related to what you just said.

I love the idea that this thing that um we would all do well to understand, to observe conscious ness itself as opposed to try to alter the contents of consciousness, may sit much closer to us. Then one might think that IT and that because it's is so close to us that that might be one of the reasons why we miss IT. I go right to a visual system example of me.

If that you don't you're wearing correct tive lens is and there's a speck on your lens. You typically you're looking out through the lens and so you won't observe that spec. Any number of different analogies could work here.

The the fact that there are states, however few um positive and negative extreme ecstasy and extreme fear being the two I think most obvious ones that seems like we agree on that allows to capture the sense of complete ness of self or the unity of the observer and the and the actor the fact that those are are seldom for the non trained for the non meditator suggest to me two things I think one perhaps worth expLoring more than the other but one is that what's really being revealed in the states where we can feel the unity of the observer in the actor is understanding something fundamental about the algorithm that, not the online algorithm, but the algorithm that is our nervous system. Just as you mentioned, self lopota y mantis rimm cy enormous array of color hues that we don't right there. P their maps and representations of the world.

They are fundamentally different, pit by scene for red. We're restricted to what of a limited range within the color spectrum, but still more vast than that of dogs or cats OK. So understanding that for seeing what a pit biber can see for moments would be informative perhaps um sensing he emissions as a human might be invasive and maybe that's why we don't do IT. So the question is so just make IT straight forward .

is why would .

the system be designed this way? Again, neither us where to consulted the design phase. But that brings me to perhaps the more tractable question was which is about development. I mean, i'm a great believer that the neural circuits that h encouraged a healthy parent child relations, or unhealthy parents, how relations as the case may be in childhood, stem from the initial demands of internal versus external states, which is exactly that we're talking about, which is that A A Young child feels anxious because that needs a dire changes, doesn't know IT needs its dire change or it's cold or it's uncomfortable or it's hungry or it's overly full. And so i'd vocalizes and then some external source comes us and relieves that.

Hopefully right is a fundamental rule that we first learn is not that we have a self for that um things falls down, not up, but is that when uncomfortable externalized that discomfort and you will be relieved by an outside player. And then of course, there's a repurposing in that circuitry for adult romantic attachments. Don't think anyone doubts that. And that can explain a lot indeed about attachment .

and so forth.

So something about our developmental wiring and the algorithms that these neural circuits run tend to buy, as most people, the non practice meditators to live a somewhat functional life at least. Without this awareness of actor and observer. And so what you're really talking about is deliberate intervention to understand and resolve that gap in the algorithm.

Do I have that right? Yes, i'm more less restating. We said in a way that I hope service are jumping off point is that you know why questions are always very dangerous.

And biology or any and in relationship, what's that? Or in relationship or in relationship, right? exactly. Although I think IT all does really hurt them back to this early developmental wiring, which of course is modifiable, that's that's the beauty of of the the nervous system is is the one organ that seems be able to change itself, at least to some degree.

So what are your thoughts about the organization of the circuitry to essentially under Normal conditions to not reveal its what seems to one of its more important and profound and um for you know there is in lightning features, right? It's almost as if we are potentially like mantis rim. We can see so many more color then we actually see and yet we don't. We we serve most people opt not to and I would argue that um one of the great strength of the waking up up for insists that IT essentially walks you through the process of being able to arrive at these things without having to go to one year, three year um long salant meditation retreats. Yeah, so he could just elaborate for a month before we move on about, know what are your thoughts about how the circuit tree is arranged by default versus and what that means for there to be an an intervention that we have to intervene in the self in order to reveal the self?

Also the two big questions there, one of about evolution and one of our development so um with respect evolution is important to recognize that evolution doesn't see our our deepest concerns about human flourishing and and human well being about is just know we are set up to spain and to survive long enough to to help our progeny spain if we can do that and and then that's IT right and so anything that was good for that, including you know a tribal ism and zeno phobia and you all kinds of hardware and software flaws that that reveal themselves to be laws in the present time when we're trying to build a viable global civilization.

Um but you know they they were down into the advantage of our ancestors somehow um or they just there there are things about us that we're simply not selected for. They just kind of came along for the ride know what Steve j god called a spandrels you know um so we are not set up by evolution to be as happy as we possibly can be um and certain and and to do almost anything that interests us well and me. We're not set up by evolution to be mathematicians or musicians or to to create democracies that are healthy.

And the evolution can see none of this. And we are doing these things based on cognitive and emotional hardware uh, that we are leveraging in new directions, right? And we have we are primates and we are we are communicating with small mouth noise is and we we're language using prime place, and all of that is clearly evolved.

Uh, and we're doing these amazing things, including science. You know, however improbably were you were actually able to, you know, almost entirely with language, understand reality that at a scale that exceeds us in both directions and in the the very vast and the very small and and you also, temporarily, the very old, uh, we have no visions of the far future. We can figure out, you know where, and you know, an android is gonna cross earth orbit a thousand years from now if we just do the math, and is amazing that we can do all of those things.

But evolution is blind to all of that, right? And so we have in terms of what we care about and certainly in terms of what we what's going to ensure our survival as species, we have flown the perch that was created forest by evolution. And me, where is not is not just the primate things.

And so, so IT is with learning how to regulate our emotions and and you know punch through to a self concept or beyond a self concept that is more informative psychologically, that allows us to not be terrorized by our apish genes, uh, as fully ly as we seem to be, even in the presence of more and more destructive technology that, I mean, we're still practically chimpanzee's armed with nuclear weapons, right? And that is increasingly dis functional. And very soon we're going to in the presence of minds, or apparent minds that we have built that are as intelligent as we are.

And very quickly, you probably fifteen minutes after that, far more intelligent than we are. And so what we do with all of that is, again, something that we have to figure out based on the minds we have, the minds we can build, the minds we can change you, we can meet up our own genomes now, and and that will produce its own consequences in ourselves and h in future generations. If we've meet to with the german line. Again, all of that is just so, you know, evolution is just sort of whom we came out of, but is not IT didn't anticipate any of that, right? So that you know mother nature has has simply not had our best interests at heart, right?

And if we might die off and and from the point of view of mother nature, that's that's fine because ninety nine percent of every species dies off, you know um so there's that but but when you're talking when you're talking about the the individual developmentally, so you know we all come into this world again as a as a um fairly hairless primate ah that needs a tremendous amount of care by others and um the logic of that is that um you know you know the reason why we're not A A gazer that run forty five minutes later than basically do all the gaza things uh perfectly uh soon there after um the reason why we have you know we have this this time of of immaturity uh and that becomes has become functional for us is is just we were were far more flexible and we can learn based on the needs of of an environment to do you know so much more than a kazu can and language is part of that. And you know in the last ten thousand years or so, culture increasingly has been more and more apart of that. And there's a probably layer which we can plausible talk about cultural evolution and cultural revolution interacting with biological evolution to change.

Um but when you're talking about the development of an individual, each of us comes into this world, I think um not recognizing ourselves in any in any sense that you would make sense to to real fy. Um it's not that there's nothing there and there could be some kind of proto self differentiation, but I think it's IT takes IT takes a long while and there is brought very likely a coincidence between really recognized IT recognized in others. We recover ze others first and we were uncertainly relationship immediately and we worry into human faces and we even detect and other humans as good and bad moral actors very early and certainly long before we recognize ourselves in a mirror.

Um we um the experiments run again this paul bloom and colleagues experiments run on kind of the moral hardware and software of developing toddlers. But I think this point they pushed down all the way, like six months of of age where you will get these infants staring at kind of a puppet and they'll dell show A A A A greater interest in classically good actors versus bad actors, know CoOperators versus defectors in various you know puppetry games. Um so there's is not that we have no mind and no proto awareness of others and of self, but what eventually happens, certainly as we become at all faster with with languages, is that we become aware that that not only are we in relationship to others, but we are an object in the world for them right? So that like we have enough people pointing at us in our cribs, right and in pinching upon our experience, right? You you're being physically moved and process and touched and console or not console and just imagine what all of these you're on the receiving end of ten thousand interventions, right?

And you're completely helpless for the longest time um and all of that attention you have all of these people coming up you know to the korean and and making faces at you and it's all pointed at you right or the they this classic magical arcis ism that that gets constructed there if you if you take a psychological literature and you know at least a certain strand of IT seriously um and I think it's is largely apt to to think of a child of that age as a kind a kind of um there is a kind of north sides c structure there where it's all kind of going in inward and at a certain point you realize, okay, i'm i'm the center of all of this, right? Like it's not just it's not just A A, A movie that your, that your your you know where you're that you're completely absorbed in and you've lost your sense of self. I mean, this is to talk up to yet another example of of what is like as a grown up to lose our sense of self.

And one of things I think we find so fascinating and about television and film is that when we get totally absorbed in IT, we're in this very unusual circumstances where where you, our brain is basically reading as warehouse in the classic social circumstances presented with, you know, the the facial displays of other people. In fact, what, you know, we can get some that sometimes these people are ten fey tall, right? Or their faces are ten fee to closed up in a movie theater.

So it's like a super stimulus in terms of of evolution. And they can they can be making direct eye contact with a camera, right? So you have the straggling tic face staring at you.

And if you're totally uncomplicated socially, you can't be seen and and something about you know, you can't be seen. And so you're completely, you completely lose self consciousness and yet you're you're able to examine with completely free attention again because you're totally uncomplicated. Um the the the facial murcia and the memetic facial play of people uh from at a very close range and me you're seeing people close to me.

You should have to be you know physically just you know about to kiss your your your spouse like that's what a close up is in a film right like that you're never get that close to people right um and yet hear you're in situation where you're unobserved and you know that. And so I know this a bit of attention, but the other side of what's happening developmental for a kid um when you're in a movie, see you are watching a movie, you are truly invisible and yet you are right there scene however, heroin, the human drama is. You're seen to play out and you're you're seen IT up close and IT is IT is in principles social encounter that your genes are ready for but they're not ready for you to be invisible, right? And so that's what's so a magical about IT.

But what happens developmentally for a kid is that you're not invisible. You're an object that is constantly being being um overrun. The boundaries of your your sensory engagement with the world are constantly being in pinched upon by others and at a certain point you recognize, okay, I am at the center of this and the and the way this gets in shined as a self um I think is probably coincident with our learn in the language game. We we learn to play with others. We're talking to others.

People are talking to us and at a certain point, we're talking to ourselves even when the other people leave the room, right? And you can hear the way, if you ever have been with a toddle, when they are, when they, when their externalizing their self talk, you know, you hear them talking to themselves, they're playing and their, and there happened a conversation. They were talking to you, the parent, but then you left the room, and then they're still talking.

You come back, and there are still, they're still talking, right? And what happens to us? strAngely? And this comes back to the logic of evolution.

We never stop because h, evolution never thought to build us an off switch for this, right? The language is so useful, and IT gets tuned up so strongly for us. Uh, and there was never a reason to shut IT off, right? There was no reason to give you this ability. So I wouldn't be nice of four hours of quiet now like no self talk up.

And so for most of us, and I think there are people who for whatever neurological reason or you know IT is incorrect reason and deadly, there would be a neurological reason for IT don't have any self talk but for most of us um we are covertly talking basically all the time and and this is an image isc component of this for many people visualizing things as well. But there's just a lot of ton of White noise in the mind that feels a certain way. And you know what I get? What you discover in meditation ultimately is that the self is what IT feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking right, a thought to rise as uninspected and seems to just become you right.

So like you and I are talking now and you you know, people are listening to us. They're struggling to follow the train of this conversation because IT is competing with the the conversation is happening in their heads, right? So i'll be saying something and a person listen will say, well, what does that mean or like he just contradicted themselves or like and there's a voice in your head that is also vying for your attention much of the time.

And um so it's you know the the first discovery people making meditation is that is just so hard to pay attention to anything the breath or montreal of the same whatever IT is because you're thinking every you're thinking about the thing you need to do in an hour and all it's so good that I I downloaded at this APP. I'm like this is really good. This going be good for but and you but you that that chatter isn't showing up. You're not far back enough uh in the in the kind of the theater of conscious ness so as to see IT emerge.

It's IT is just sneaking up behind you and IT feels like me again IT feels like when someone is thinking the thought, what the hell does that mean, right? They're not seeing this as an emerging objects and consciousness IT just feels like me IT just feels that that's IT is the subjectively is like the mind contracts around this appearance and conscious ness and IT really is IT is just as you know, it's just a sound with the voice of the mind if you actually can inspect IT IT is IT is deeply inscrutable table that we ever feel identified with our thoughts mean, how is IT that we could be a thought? These thoughts, I thought, just arrived this and passes away.

And when you inspect, when you go to inspect IT, it's IT, you know, IT unravels. It's, it's, it's IT is the least substantial possible thing. And and I could, but yet IT could be a thought of self hatred, you know, I could be A A thought that unrecognized totally defines your your mood. You know, it's like I may just again, this all consume kind of abstract, but no.

but I but I think it's extremely concrete from the perspective of the neural circuits that will return to and IT. Maybe a few minutes, if you could elaborate a bit on this notion of internal chatter and external stimuli, the bridge between them because that I think that for some people that might be into IT, if I think for others, it's not so obvious that language is ongoing right backtrack.

Yeah .

sometimes I think some people are more tuned into um that language. For some people it's it's louder volume. For some people it's more structured. I have a colleague at stanford. He's been on this podcast called dice the prime like bio and know psychiatrist and he has a he doesn't called a meditation Price as a practice where each evening after five kids are put down sleep, you know, they're all there now, but in the quiet of the the late hours of the night, early morning, he sits and forces himself to think in complete sentences with puntuated for an hour. This is the way that he has taught himself to structure his thinking.

Because of the very fact that you're describing, which is an ordinary there is an underlying structure to what's internal, but it's disrupted by external event and its and these are typically it's not coherent enough to really make meaning from. So it's almost like somebody seeing down to ride in complete sentences but force himself to do IT in his head. But for many people, including myself, that's that's a foreign experience.

And we only experience structure through our interactions with the world and other people that if I were, i've taken the time to train and explore ideas with eyes closed and know I been able to do that. There are certain for ecologic states that we can talk about that, facilitate that. And no, they are not effective means those do exactly the opposite, by the way.

But um I think people exist in varying degrees of structured and and unstructured internal dialogue and in varying depths of recognition of that internal dialogue. And so the question, I suppose, is just the recognition that there is an a dialogue ongoing internally. Is that itself valuable?

yeah. And that also can take some time. So so here's a claim I would make that some people might find surprising, but I think this is an objectively true claim about the subjectivity of most people, which is that unless you you know have a fair man of train, let you just happened to be some kind of save in this area which most people, by definition, art or you have a remarkable amount of training in what's called you concentration practice in meditation. Um I think I believe this is A A true claim that you know if we just put a you a stop watch on this table and and you know people could just watch you know thirty seconds a lapse and um I said I said all of our listeners, your viewers, the task uh for the next thirty seconds, just pay attention to anything your breath, you or you, the side of your hand or the side of the clock or uh any object without getting lost in thought, without getting momentarily distracted by this conversation you're having with yourself um this couple things would happen. One is no one would be able to do IT right and and not just this is not just A A superficial inability.

I mean, if your lights depended on IT, you wouldn't be able to do IT if the fate of civilization depended on IT, none of none of our listeners would be able to do this um and he had some percentage of them are are so distracted by I thought that they would think they will actually try this experiment and think they succeeded, right? And for these people, what what happens if you put them on a meditation retreat and you have them spend twelve hours a day in silence doing nothing? But this rates of the practices just pay attention to the breath when they're sitting, and then eventually you incorporate everything, sounds and other sensations, and then you to leave that with walk in meditation, whether paying attention just to the sensations of lifting and moving in place in their feet. And then you know once the practice is going, you you incorporate sounds and sites and everything, but so you can pay attention everything.

But the goal is for every moment um you are going to you are going to cultivate that what this is something of mine which are increasingly is known as mindfulness right so and mindfulness is nothing other than this very careful attention to the contents of consciousness ness uh but the crucial pieces IT is not a moment of being lost and thought right you're you you're not block and thoughts thoughts themselves can arrive but in those moments of being truly mindful you're noticing thoughts as thoughts whether the whether it's language in the mind or images you're noticing those two as spontaneous appearances and consciousness um so if if most people you know certains, anyone who thinks they can pay attention to, you know they can do the experiment successfully, that I just a suggest IT pay attention to something for thirty seconds without being lost and thought you put those people on a meditation retreat, what they're going to experiences, you know, on the first day they're going to feel like, oh yeah, I was with the breath. I was walk with the sensations of walking and i'd be there for like five minutes, you know, saw lid and then I would get lost and thought, then I come back, you know, five more minutes to be lost and thought, get back. But as the days progressed, you know, even, you know, ten days in to a silent meditation tat, they're going to experience more and more distraction.

They're going, it's gona seem like, okay, wait a minute. Now I can't pay attention to anything for more than five seconds, right? That is progress, right? Because because what their discovering is just how reactive they are, right? And um you know some for some people that will be immediately obvious. For some people, it'll actually take a lot of practice to realize just how district IT there.

What usually said, which was that at some point we can start noticing our thoughts. I can notice my thoughts, but what you are talking about is as a goal state is not is not being distracted by thoughts, but actually seeing the relationship between thoughts, self and other types of perceptions. And here I think recognizing and seeing thoughts is a former perception, is just an internally directed perception.

This raises topic that um i'm also obsessed by which I think the other science can someone explain, but still incomplete incompletely that the circuits of mechanics that are not yet known, which is about time perception and you a simple analogy would be that there are a lot of a small objects flying around in the space that we happen to be having this discussion. They're moving so fast that I can't perceive them or the entirely stationary so I can't perceive them because of the reasons we talked about before in the visual system, my eyes are moving in perfect concert with these, with these small object movements. And therefore there I am blind to them, right? A slight shift in time perception.

Think of this perhaps as a change in the frame rate. My camera frame rate, faster frame rate, you can capture slow motion. Slower er frame rate, you can na get more of a strobe type, perfect if the framework is low enough, right? right? Could IT be that our time perception is not one thing, but we have one rate of perceiving time for external objects, that a given distance, which we know is true.

Another frame rate for objects that are up close, know this to be true, even if those objects are moving in the exact same speed. Right in this would be the sitting on a train. The rungs on the fence seem to be going by very, very fast, but the ones in the distant seem to be moving slowly.

This is the way the the visual system in time perception interconnect. At some level, you're bona sky scrape for the little animals, cars and people down below. You know, they're moving much faster than you perceive them to move. Yeah but it's it's a distance .

of you see a plane this could be going three hundred miles an hour.

exactly. yes. And it's not because of the lack of resolution. The lack of resolution is incidental. We know this because in the animals such as hawks, that have twice the degree of acuity, as far as we know, they have the same distance associated shifts in time perception.

So could IT be that we are running multiple streams of time perception, multiple coins of attention that include coins of attention to our thoughts, and that somehow, through meditation, we start to align the frame rate for these different streams of attention so that they all fall, they all fall into the same movie, if you will. Although it's not just a movie with visual content, what i'm doing here is clearly i'm becoming a lumper rather than a splitter. I'm sure this violate certain rules of time perception nal circuitry, but i'm not sure that it's entirely untrue either. And does IT survive at all as a possible model for what you're describing? And if the answer is no.

i'm perfectly comfortable that, well, it's say it's dependent on what you mean by meditation. This this is what you sorted. The particularity of what one is doing with ones attention under the frame of meditation really matter because there ways to practice where practice mindfulness in particular, where the frame rate really does seem to go weigh up right, is actually been some research done on this.

We take people before and after three months silent meditation trip and you give them some kind of visual discrimination task where they have to detect um I think they used to to kiss. The scope is at the tool for presents um you know like very quick pulses of light. Any case you can you can discriminate um just in any in any sensory channel.

I would imagine you can make final grain discriminations if you're practicing mindful this in a very specific way, which is to be making these fine grain discriminations more and more and do do nothing else for, you know, three months, which is, which is a way of practicing. So you're so the classic mindless practice in in was called the personal meditation, is to pay scruple less attention to seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching in a way that breaks everything down into the this kind of microscopic sensory a moment. So you know, you're rather than feel your your hands pressing together, what you're trying to feel with your attention and you feeling more and more is all of the microseconds tions of pressure and temperature and movement, uh, such that the feeling of hands completely disappears.

You realized that the hand is a concept and all you have is this cloud of a punk tate and and uh very brief sensations and so so anything you think you you you have as a data of experience as you as you born into IT with your attention IT IT resolves into a of this kind of didier and is cloud of changing sensation. And that can be even even something as as captivating as I know, a serious pain in your body. You you have injured your neck, you know and to have some exercise pain in your neck.

If you just are willing to pay attention to IT you and just pay a hundred percent attention to IT um you, a couple things happen. One is your resistance to feeling that goes away by definition because you now your goals just just pay attention to IT and you recognize that so much of the suffering associated with the pain was born of a of the resistance to feeling IT. You're kind of embrace against IT and all of you're thinking about, you know you think like, well, why do I do this to myself or what should I see an north pedestal?

How long is this going to last and and you maybe I her needed a disc like all of that self talk is producing anxiety and you i'm not saying there's never anything to think about there. But you know either you can do something about IT in the moment or you can and uh, so much of our suffering in in the presence of pain is the result of resisting IT, worrying about IT think is just all of the everything we are doing with our minds, but just just feeling IT, right? So when you just feel IT again, IT IT IT breaks apart into this, this ever change, ever shifting in collection of of different sensations.

And it's not one thing, and I never stays the same and it's and so the two things happen there. One is there can be a tremendous dous ment for relief that happens there where you you you can achieve a level of equimed ity even in the presence of really unpleasant a physical sensation um and this is true of mental sensation as well as is true emotions, classical negative emotions like anger, depression or fear. The moment you become willing to just feel them in all of their punk te a um and change able qualities, they ceased to be what they they were a moment ago.

They are just and they when you're talking about emotional states, they cease to map back on to you and yourself concept as meaningful in the same way so that suddenly the anxiety you feel will say before going out on stage to give a talk. You know, a moment ago, IT was IT had psychological meaning. I felt like, you know, okay, i'm anxious.

How do I get rid of this? Why am I this sort of person know? Should I have taken a ba blocker? This is the the conversation you you're having with yourself. The moment just become willing to feel IT as the pure energy of the physiology of the, of course, is all release. IT ceases to have any meaning.

IT just is ceases to be a problem in that moment, because IT is no more, you know, more maps onto the kind of person you are than a feeling of indigestion or a pain. And your and your knee maps onto the kind of person you are. It's just it's, it's just sensation.

Anyway, put back to the main point here, which is that if you train your attention in this way to notice the particularities of of sensory experience and emotional experience, you're looking for the atoms of experience. No um you get Better and Better at that and certain things happen. But one thing one thing that I really do think happens is there's a kind of frame rate change in in the the data stream where you really are just you're just noticing much, much more. Um all of that is a very interesting way of training.

It's not what I tend to recommend now is is is a great preliminary practice for what I do recommend because IT gives you IT really teaches you the difference between being lost and thought and not IT really teaches you what mindfulness is but IT tends to be done, you know, by ninety nine point nine percent of of people in a dualistic way, which you again, you're set up to think, okay, i'm over here is the locus of attention, you know and and i'm continually getting distracted by thought and the project is to not do that anymore and actually pay attention to the breath and sounds and sensations and and every time I get lost and thought, i'm going to go back to here. But this whole dance of a lost and thought now strategy directly in my attention. Again, all of this seems to ramify this sense of self, the sense of of there's one to be doing.

This is somebody holds in the spotlight of attention and getting Better at coming back to the object of meditation. Um again, it's inevitable that ninety nine point and nine percent of people are going to start there and stay there for some considerable period of time. But the thing I like to do when I talk about all of this is undercut the false assumptions that are anchoring all of that as early as possible.

Because where I think you want to be is recognizing that there is no place from which to any attention, right through this whole dale stic s set up of subject and object is the thing that is already not there. And it's not that you, it's not that it's there and you meditated out of existence successfully, it's really not there. And if you if you learn how to look for IT, you can see that is not there and feel that is not there and is no longer seems to be there, right?

It's like it's it's not and IT becomes like again, like a by stable percept where you looked at a long enough and if you thought, okay, now I see the face and the face and um I can only see IT and every time I look it's it's there again right and um so yeah that me so to come back to the the example you gave with your um your colleague is anchored um whose book I know I have I haven't read IT is this is he wrote a book projections right desertio um so it's on my test read but. It's the opposite what i'm recommending essentially the opposite of the continuum of the sort of internal exercise he was he was doing so rather than so you know he's doing something very deliberate and controlled and he's know he is deliberately thinking in complete sentences and kind of common during the the the the machinery of thought and attention uh, in a way that I would imagine I might be interest to talk him about IT. But I would imagine he really feels like he's doing that right and .

there's he's an engineer know, as you describe IT in this way, IT reminds me he's a physician but he's also an engineer is really about taking the the raw materials of thought and engineering something structured from IT. And I haven't been in corals mind yeah but .

we ve got him talking on that.

I'm sure we would get you do that conversation at some point, but exact .

exact that would be to recognize that the sense of control is a total illusion, right there, equal because you don't know what you're going to think next, right? And even he in the most abort. Well, I mean, he could he could just get as muscular as he wants with IT.

He still doesn't know what he's going to think next. right? Thought, because thoughts simply a ise. I know you. You can run this experiment for yourself. And this connects up to the topic of a free will, which we might want to touch. But I mean, just think of any category of thing.

You know, I asked you to think of, you know, the names of cities or, you know, friends you have or famous people you you can, you remember exist or, uh think of nouns or you know you know anything um and just watch what comes per culture into consciousness right now. There's there are things you can think of, all the things you don't know the name of you know there are languages you don't speak. There is there are famous people you've never seen or never heard of, right? So like like, so you have no control over that part.

Like those those names and and faces are not going to suddenly come streaming into conscious ness, but of of the the totality of facts and figures and faces and names that you do know, right only some will come fine for inclusion, right? And they're not and there's there's a sort of you know we could um my guess that we know something about the neurology of this but know depending on what channel your your you're waiting for thoughts in I mean this can be different if is visual or semantic or or episode memory all of these things are different but um wherever you can point your inner gaze of attention and wait for the next phase or name certain things we're ongoing to come and certain air, certain things aren't going to come and how you land on one right i'll be this process if you're paying attention, you might think that we go with names of cities, right? You just you say you, you'll think of paris, you'll think of london, you'll think of rome, you'll of sedona. You'll so these names will come. And if I ask you to just say one right, many apples.

what came in to mind for me was very strong, as mini appa famous person was joe drama. And they just like, I can give you reasons why I think that those came to mine recent conversations.

Okay, so so so whatever. So we know we know a very Better, but very bit about much of this. So one, we know that your reasons you know obviously be right, wrong. They're very likely to be wrong because we have this sort of confabulating oral storytelling mechanism, even in an intact brain, where we just you, we, we seem to never lack for the reasons why something came to mind.

And we know, we can know, we can manipulate people in ways that prove the big people are just reliably wrong and confident, confidently so about the reasons why they thought of things or did things. But leaving that aside, even if you're completely accurate, right? Um there are there are people's names who you know and city's names that you know that inexplicably just didn't come to mind.

And if we ran this experiment again and again again, they wouldn't come to mind if your brain was in precisely the state IT was in a moment ago, if we could return your brain to the state IT was in a moment ago, correcting for you know all the deterministic changes and all the random changes that would have to you be corrected forward to just get all the synapses and the synaptic wait and know everything in in the the state was in to produce joe s drama and many apples, right you're going to we rewind that movie, that part of the move of your life you are going to say joe drama and many apples a trillion times in a row right so this is why in my view, the notion of free will makes absolutely no sense, right um and you can add as much random as that process as you want is still doesn't get you the freedom people think they have ah there is another conversation to have about you know why none of that matters and why things only get Better once you would met yourself that free will and illusion um and yes you can get in shape and you can die. You can do all the things you want to do and you don't have to think about well um but the from from a contemplative meditation point of view the thing to notice is that everything is just spring interview right here like there's no place from which you are authoring your next thought because you would have to think IT before you think IT right. I got like like there is just there is just this fundamental mystery at our backs that is discord ing everything that we experience.

What if i'm speaking? So if i'm talking about something and I have some command of that information, I can often sense what i'm going to saying next and then find myself saying IT hopefully that in something else I certainly said things I didn't intend to say or and never thought I would say in life, but when engaged in speech or action, at least gives us the illusion, I think that we somehow have more command over our thoughts.

Yeah what you have a script and is like the things you know a lot about and you've talked you've talked about them a lot and you you know you have the things you want to say about those things and the things you don't want to say you wouldn't want to say um and you know you can know it's still as a bit of a high wire act because you can miss speaker or you can fail to get to the end of the same dramatically correct way and and is again, all of this subjectively, this whole process is mysterious to you like you you don't know how you follow the rules of english grammar just you just your tongue is doing IT somehow and you um and when IT fails, IT fails and you're just a surprise as the next guy that IT failed and you know you mispronounce a word and okay, I don't know what happened there but it's if he keeps happening, i'm going to worry I had a stroke and you know IT stops, i'm going going to worry about um so it's still mysterious even when you're doing IT in a very um wrote, deliberative and repetitive way.

But when when you're talking about something you've talked about a lot and you know you should to know where you going to go, right? Like and this is you know we we have many conversations like this. Um IT is somewhat analogous to like a golf swing or like you know how you want to do IT.

This can be all kinds of errors that are going to creep into your execution of IT in real time. But it's like you you basically have a pattern and so you have certainly gissing patterns, which you're following. Um again, none of this is a proof of a free will, but I will grant you that phenomenon logically IT IT feels different then just waiting for the next thought to come.

But my point is, is that even if you are and you can trim IT down to the simpler st possible thing, like you take two things you like to to drink, right? You may you like, you like coffee and you like tea and and you're decide in which to have right both on offer you've got two cups in front of you and and the questions you know which you know you here I got water and I got coffee, which am I going to drink next? It's is incredibly, is a simple as possible decision.

And no matter how long I make this decision process, I could literally sit for an hour trying to figure out which to reach for next. And I could have my reasons why, and I could have my all myself talk. There's going to be a final change in me that's gonna the proximate cause of me decide in one over the other and that no matter how laborious I can make IT seem in in terms of my reasoning about IT um IT is gonna fundamentally mysterious as to why I went with one rather than the other, whatever story I look, because it's like it's still gonna be as mysterious as you thinking of joe drama when you absolute, like you know, of the existence of parliament just as much.

And yet he simply didn't occur to you, right, like it's it's fundamental mysterious, like there are people who are even more famous then joe driver to you, right? Who who am sure you you know you maybe somebody who you have thought a lot about, but but there there are people who like if we could just inventory you know your conscious life going back last ten years. They're people who you thought about more than joe drama yet they didn't appear right so and and that that is mysterious right and they could have didn't and so um and what what i'm saying is that this mystery never gets banished in our experience. Whatever stories we have to tell about IT like because if if the story is, oh, well, I went for the water because some I I I think i've been drinking too much coffee you know, listen to Andrew huberman s podcast and he was talking about .

coffee and and I think of Price yeo.

that is actually the caul chain. Like I listened to your podcast, you said something about caffeine. Now i'm now i'm self conscious about my coffee intake, right? But that's just just add in what a couple of links to the chain this is.

So this fundamental mystery of, well, why did I find that persuasive and why? Why did I find that persuasive now? And not five minutes ago when I was drinking the coffee, right? Like, why did I just remember IT now? Or why was IT effective net? Like what like you you only have your experience in every moment is precisely what IT is and not one bit more like.

And this subsumes even moments of real resolve and effort and you know, picking yourself up by your bootstraps and changing everything like you're on a diet and you're tempted to do chocolate and you think you're about to ration, say, no, i'm not, i'm not breaking this diet. This diet is actually going to stick, right. Okay, why did that arise in that moment and not at this analogous moment on your last diet? right? And why did you rise now to precisely the degree that IT did? why? Why will IT be as effective as IT will be and have a half life that I will have? And not, you know, ten percent more or less, like all of those are always mysterious .

to what could we give a um as we did before um an evolutionary and a developmental explanation an evolutionary explanation might be that um directed attention and action is metabolite demanding that would be a inefficient to are impossible for us to be in consistent you know deliberate action and with access to all the relevant information as to why we would do anything.

So our ideas literally spring to the surface at the last possible moment in order to offset the meta lic the great meta lic requirements of having ideas that are are related to go directed action, or they go directed action is expensive. That's one a the other idea would be. And we know this as a fact, which is that initially the brain is fairly cruelly wired. That's not true. Within the neural circuits, the control breathing heart rate is Better but within the neural circuits of a century perception thought that said other fairly cruelly wired and then across development there's a progressive pruning back and uh also in parallel that a strengthening of the connections that underlie directed action in thought um and here I don't mean directed as in free will, I mean just I can decide to imagine an apple in imagine that apple, for instance.

there seems to be some .

maintenance of the the random fine random wiring in systems. I mean, we've seen this even in in worms, in flies, in you and so called lower in vertebrates and lower vertebrates. And we see this in humans.

And IT seems to be that there's a lot of background spontaneous activity in our song collector rods into the brains of humans, macos carnival mice. And in every case, most of what you hear is called hash. And IT has nothing to do with how he is.

Dial is picking up a bunch action potentials as they are listening to a course of action potentials. But IT rare define a neuron that faith fires to represent some centuries stimulus in the world. And you can arrange that marriage experimentally that you can arrive at those strong signal to noise events.

But I was always struck by how much noise there is in the system all around, all the time. And people argue, is the noise really? Noise at that time is said, there's still love to wait about that. But I can imagine that some of the the spontaneous nature of thoughts just relate to the fact that there's a lot of backgrounds, spontaneous activity in the brain. Now why that is, is a whole other discussion.

But but if I were deserve set up to constraints that there's a lot of sponge activity, it's going to generate random thoughts, thankfully, not much random action, although there's a little bit of random action in our daily lives. And then against that, say, well, any deliberate thought or motion is going to be expensive, right? So meta ally expensive, we're going to begin with.

And so you just have to evolution has arrived at a place where spontaneous guiza up of things um upon which like deliberate thoughts and action are superimposed is the best arrangement overall for this very metal ability demanding organ is that of I mean, what I basically gave was just kind of a biological description of of of one just one narrows aspect of IT. But can we get comfortable with that? And the reason I say get comfortable is that I and here I immediately and forcing a little bit of a strip tease towards what I think I and everyone else wants to know, which is how to meditate and why, in particular, meditation convinces us that something doesn't necessarily have to be eliminated.

But that was actually never there. I feel like we're now set up sort almost like a you're not contradicting yourself by any means, but in my mind there's a contradiction and here's the contradiction. I love this statement that meditation over time or done properly, reveals to us that were actually not trying to make the gap between actor and observer go away.

IT was actually never there to me that's one of the more important statements that I grave i've ever heard and that inspires me to go further down this path of meditation because i've never experienced that um not deliberately and certainly not through meditation um if I ever experience IT IT was transient enough that I know I mean treated to to experiment. So on the one hand, you're telling me something was never there. And there's A A profound experience to be had by anyone that's willing to do the work to arrive at that experience of the loss of that illusion.

On the other hand, i'm hearing that there is a um a profound gap that really does exist, which is that ah we we believe that our thoughts are somehow from us and in d therefrom in in the crinisus ult some place maybe in the body a bit as well, but that we over attribute the degree to which we are that and that is us in a way that's violation that we control. And so once i'm hearing that there's something there's an illusion that we can eliminate. And on the other hand, i'm hearing that there's an illusion that we can eliminate and maybe these are unrelated and on bridging them in in in an unsupportable way, that seems only important to me. But somehow I I can't resolve these two. And maybe the thing to do that is, is can we separate them in terms of practice to witness them that would allow us to resolve them separately.

right? I think I am here in the problem there is this, well, let let me a break at the whole free world discussion because it's it's IT really is the flip side of the coin that that the obverse of which is the illusion, the illusion of .

the selves OK. So at right tracking, they are the opposite sides of a coin OK. Because to me, they seem very different in in essence. No.

because because because what i'm calling the sense of self and what people what I think most people feel as their core sense of self is the this feeling of, I think, is the feeling of being the locus of attention. But it's also the feeling of being the locus of agency. Like I can do the next thing I like who's doing this, who's reason for the cup?

I am right, I intended this and I am doing the thing. And ten my conscious intention is the proximate cause of my region, right? Um so i'm the offer and so i'm the author of my thoughts and actions essentially and i'm and my and my specific uses of attention, right I can pay attention to the breath.

I get lost in thought I come back to the breath, but um you know the lot that on some level the thoughts themselves are more of my doing something almost you know authorial intent， right? Like I am thinking, like, you know what the houses guy talking about? I I know, I know, I know, you know who's thinking these thoughts?

I am right like that that the person who really doesn't get what i'm saying is thinking something like that, right? Like what the focus is guy talking about, like, I know i'm here, i'm myself, know my body, i'm my mind. I can reach for things.

These these intentional actions are different from things that happened to me, right? Uh, a voluntary action is different from an involuntary one is having a tremor is different from consciously decided to pick up a glaster um so obviously everything i'm saying about meditation and the self and free will, in order to be a sain picture of a human mind and a reality has to conserve the data of experience such that yes, I can acknowledge the difference between a tremor and a deliberate involuntary motor action 嗯。 And you and the things you do volition, ally are different, not just psychologically and behaviorally, but they had just have different implications for like in a quarter law, you know you accidentally hit someone with your car or you did IT on purpose.

That still A A distinction that matters, right? IT. Importantly, IT tells us a lot about the global properties of your mind, such that we have a sense of what you're likely to do in the future if you're someone who likes running over people with your car, you know you're A A cycle path who we need to worry about.

If someone who did IT by accident, well, then you know you may be A. Culpable for for the the level of neglect gent, that allow that to happen but you you're a very different person and we treat you differently and were wise to um so anyway we can those was black at all of that um. There's this I think there's some fundamental there's some false assumptions about the underline logic of this process, which I think is worth addressing.

And that is actually that there was a kind of found object in the news that I I talk about at one point. I forget word is in in the waking up, but there was a story I stumbled on on the internet. I think about twelve or thirteen years old of a um a tourist bus and think he was in norway.

He was said someone is in in northern europe and ahead of about thirty people on IT and one person was was a describe as an asian woman and the all they went they went to a rest stop and everyone got off the bus uh and they know shop and head lunch and and this asian woman changed her clothing uh for whatever reason and they all got back on the bus um I think the relevance of had been in an asian woman is know they're language barriers that that that explain what later happened um so everyone gets back on the boss the asia woman has changed to her clothing and the boss is about to leave but then someone notices hey there there was an asian woman have gone off the bus who IT hasn't come back and they tell the driver this um and this poses the problems and now everyone was waiting for this person to return but in fact everyone was on the bus that this woman had just changed her clothing and was not recognized by her fellow travelers um so everyone gets concerned as this this tourist doesn't know show up and they start looking for right and they can find her and so a search party is formed and the asian woman because of the whatever language barrier um heard that there was a missing tourist so SHE joins the search party which in fact is looking for her right and this goes on into the night and they're ready in helicopters that you further dawn patrol to find the missing missing tourist ah now at some point along the way. I think goes IT like three in the morning this tourist realizes that he is the object of the search right and obviously the whole thing unravels SHE SHE confesses that SHE change her close. You know, the problem solved, but the problem is not solved by the the logic that the seeker is expected, right? So it's like it's not true to say that the missing tourist was found in in the way that was expected, right? Because the missing tourist was never lost.

The missing tourist was part of the search party, right? And so when you think about IT, from her point of view, like what happened, she's part of the search party. She's looking for the missing tourist, not knowing that SHE, in fact, is the missing tourist.

So what happens at the moment? He realizes that everyone's looking for her, right? Like what what is the the search isn't consumated in the way that is implied by the logic of everyone's user attention um and yet the problem evaporates and there's something deeply analogous about the structure of that and the the meditation in in in precisely in again, not talking about all the changes in the the possible changes in the contents of consciousness that could be good, which again cut they come along for the ride anyway.

When you when you do the thing i'm talking about, it's not on this point of looking for yourself and not finding the end. There is a sense that, okay, the self is here and it's a problem. IT is the spring upon which all of my conscious states, mostly unhappy ones, are strong, right?

It's it's the thing that is at the center of my anxiety. It's the it's the thing that I don't feel good about is the thing that when criticized I sort of that employ um is the center of my problem. And now i'm trying to feel Better and meditation has been handed to me as a as a possible you know remedy for my situation and and it's build as a remedy.

And in fact, it's it's i'm hearing from the guy that this is the thing that is going to cause me to realize that myself isn't where you know. Or as I thought that was um as soon now i'm gonna look right. And so again, your your the sense is I start out far away from the goal here.

I start out with a problem. I'm now meditating on the evidence of my unenlightened right. I can feel my problem. I feel that i'm distracted and distractable, and I feel like this sort of crap at the center of my life with its me.

And i'm not as happy as I want to be and not as confidence I want to be more distractable than I want to be. And now i'm paying attention to the breath, right? Um this is what the search party feels like. This is what the the confused tourist feels like in her own search party. And she's she's looking she's looking for the person and so the angle of of you the inclination of all of this is and the logic of IT is all wrong, you know understandably so uh given how we we all get into this situation. But you know it's useful to continually try to undercut IT and um recognize the thing that's being looked for is is actually right on the surface, which is there is no one looking.

There is no place from which you are if you are paying attention to the breath or the sounds or noticing the next thought arise the sense that you are over here doing that thing is actually what is like to be thinking and not knowing that you're thinking you're there's there's a thought there's an undercurrent of thought that's going uninspected in that moment. And um so there is just say there are continually looking for the mind and looking for the center of experience, looking for the one who is looking which again which is the kind of the orient in practice here and is a lot more I say about this obviously um over waking up, but um it's it's the experiment you have to perform in order to get ready to recognize that this all the search party you know was formed in in error essentially. And the the problem that you're trying to to solve with this practice does evaporate in in a similar way, which is like you don't actually get there in the way that you're hoping for, right? It's like like you drop out the bottom of this thing in unexpected way.

It's not there's actually another uh kind of a similar um parable or or anette that I don't not remember the zana or Sophia i'm sure has been reappropriation in different ways, but or by many different traditions. But there's the the case of somebody has a lost in a town and then they're asking for directions. You know you can put put this in in in manhattan.

You can just say your wandering manhattan, you're your tourist. You where anything is, you stop and ask someone, you know, wear central park and the person thinks for a second and says, well, unfortunate you can't get to central park from here right now. That is a very strange. I mean, we you think about that for second. You realize, okay, that's a as an absurd client, there is no place that you can't get to from the place you are starting, you know, on earth, right?

The failure to describe the physical, a relationships between anything in the world yeah.

that's just not the world we live in, right? So but it's a funny thing but but on some level that is true of meditations like you can't get there from here like that the sense of you the sense of you as subject isn't brought along to this thing you're looking for, right? Like you're like your you know it's almost like it's almost like you you're making a fist and you're trying to get to an open hand.

The fist doesn't get to take that journey as a fist, right? Like you don't the fist doesn't go along for the ride, the fist comes apart, right? And and some level that are subjectivity is a kind of an an an attentional fist in IT is a contraction of energy. Again, it's it's so much bound up and thought for for uh, most of us most of the time that is and IT when when properly inspected, there's just this in evaporation of the starting point. But there's not this there's not this fulfillment of i'm going to get this fish is gonna going to, if, you know, if life gets good enough, if I get concentrated enough, focused enough, if I all steer enough, if I renounced enough, if I desired less, if I know no enough, with enough good intentions, this face is going to move into some sort of to bind condition, right? That's not the logic of the the product.

I I really preciate these models and analogies for conscious experience, both as most people experience them and harbor them in its as a way to frame what's possible through through a proper meditation practice. And do you want to talk about what a proper meditation practice looks like a bit? But at some point I do want to raise a model of maybe even just perceptual awareness to see if IT survives the filters that you've provided.

But first, just even if briefly, and then we could return to IT. You know, what does this meditation practice or set of practices look like? Obviously, the APP is a wonderful tool. I've started using IT. As I mentioned the beginning, my my father's been using IT for a while and many people have drive great benefit from IT.

But if we were to and break IT down meditation into some basic component parts as we have broken down Normal perceptual experience and some of its component part yeah um I can just throw out some things that I associate with meditation and maybe you can elaborate on on health may may not be applied for instance. Um there is almost always um a ceasing of motor robust motor movement. I know they are walking meditations and so forth, but seems like sitting or lying down and perhaps not always, but often limiting our visual perception, closing the eyes, directing a mdi some place.

Um is there a dedicated effort toward generating imagery? What are the component parts? And where i'm really going with this is why would those component parts eventually allow for this disillusion of the fist or the the realization that there is no distinction between actor and .

observer and so on? Yeah yeah. Answer the second question first. Ultimately, meditation is not a practice that you're adding to your life. Is not is not to doing more of anything, actually seizing to do something that is ultimately non distraction. I me it's ultimately you recognizing what conscious ness is like when you're no longer distracted by the the automatic arising of of thought is not the thoughts don't arise, is not that you can use them, is not that you become irrational or or um uh you know unintelligent I mean, like all of that you still have all of your tools but there are every everything is in plain view and that there's an analogy in tibetan buddhists which I love which is. You know kind of in the final stage of meditation, thoughts are like sieves entering an empty house.

There's nothing for them to steal, right? So in in the usual case, thoughts are, there really is something in jeopardy every time I thought comes i'm not meditating anymore and and not only that, I feel terrible because of what i'm thinking about most the time right um and so it's totally understandable, I thought seemed like a problem in the beginning. And for certain types of meditation they are explicitly thought of as a problem because your trying to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, including thought.

And that is that what I called concentration practice earlier and that is a know, is that a training that can be good to do IT becomes a tool that you can use for other kinds of of of insight, but is a very specific and kind of brittle skill. In the end of is, is, is a skill, just like i'm going to pay attention of one thing, and I can do that so well that everything else is going to fade out. And somebody analogies to what you you described in the visual system, if you, if you know if have a laser focus to one fixation point, everything else in your visual field begins to to fade out.

But meditatively, if you have a laser focus on any one thing, what where's the breath or or you a candle flame, whatever is not only does me me so what to use the breath for you know for a second uh because your eyes can be closed um you may you can lose all sense of everything and made you can lose all sense of hearing and your your physical body can disappear and like literally can become incredibly subbed and vast and drug like. And many people approach meditation, thinking, kind of climbing the latter of those changes into suddenly and vastness. That's the whole, that's the whole game, right? And IT can be a deeply rewarding game to play.

And IT also does come with all kinds of ancillary benefits. I mean all the focus and the calm and and the they kind of smoothness of emotional states. I know all that comes with greater concentration and IT IT can be quite wonderful um but again, at best that's a tool to aim in the direction that I am talking about now with with respective meditation, which relates to more what I would call you mindfulness generally um and ultimately kind of non dual mindfulness. So mindfulness generically and for for most people, certainly in the in the beginning, dualistic ally is just the practice of paying careful attention to whatever is a rising on a zone right now. In the beginning, it's natural to take a single object like the breath as a starting point is kind of an anchor uh but you know very, very quickly you know over the course of even you know your first week of doing this, people can teachers and um various sources of information will recommend that know once you get some facility that wants he wants you know the difference between being lost and thought and actually paying attention to the breath well then you can open IT up to everything.

You can open up the sounds and other sensations and the body and and move emotions and even ultimately thoughts themselves and so very quickly you can recognize that thoughts are not intrinsically the enemy to this practice they are also just spontaneous appearances in consciousness that can be observed um but for some considerable period of time people will feel that there is a place from which that observation is happening right there is just you and now the one who's being mindful um and however attenuated that sense of self can be and again can you can get very expensive and you can you know you can lose you know as you get anything just a month of concentration. You know IT becomes very drug like and you get you know here the boundaries of your body desole, then you're you're feeling of having a body can disappear and um and you know your eyes are closed. You know your visual field can be most people when they close their eyes initially, they just forget about their visual field.

But if you close your eyes right now, you know this your visual field is fully present and you know it's we call IT dark, but it's not quite dark. There is a sort of simulating uh some field of of of color and shadow um that's there be in the darkness of your closed eyes and that can become a skylight domain of vast. A visual expression that opens up as you as you get more concentrated with you know with your eyes closed, right so you're so you can very much be aware of seen with your eyes closed in in meditator practice um but from the point of view of mindfulness, the logic is not to care about any of the interesting changes and experience that come as a result of practicing in this way because what you the the underline goal is, is to be more and more economist with changes so it's not to grass but what's pleasant or interesting and not to push what's unpleasant door or you know born or you know otherwise, not engaging a way. Um what you want is just a kind of a guy like mind that just allows everything to appear and you're not cleaning anything or work or reacting anything.

Could I ask you what your thoughts are about the differences between knowns additives and verbs in the context of what were talking about and you're describing? And the reason bring this yourself, is that as you know and I know everything in biology is a process we would never ever say, oh, you know, the perception of that red line on a painting is is a now, right? I mean, it's it's an event in the visual system.

You you're abstracting some understanding about that thing in the outside world, and I think it's very useful. And thinking about the brain, and people know, as I notice, I excuse me, actively avoid the use of the word mind, because I figure, especially with you sitting across from me, that all i'll step in IT, if I, if I do. But the brain generates a series of perceptions.

What have you buy through processes, not nouns? And so when thinking about biology, I think of development is a as an arc of processes, aging as an art of perception, as an arch of processes, just exist on different time skills. And so a little bit of what I am hearing is that inside of an effective meditation practice there's a little bit of a of a certain ly non judgment but discarding of the now and the modes of language like red apple.

Okay, it's a red apple. But then you server need to eliminate some other adjective about IT. It's a rotten apple, it's a right apple. And instead view the appearance and disappearance of that apple as a is just a thing of process as opposed to an event. And now events could we could really get into the language aspect that that just reveals how diminished languages to describe the workings of the brain at some level. I don't know any of this resonates, but IT.

But IT seems to me the goal, or one of the goals, is to start to understand the algorithm, that is, the fleet nature of perception, but did not focus on any one single perception, and then did not even fox on one single algorithm, but to, at some level, there is a what is revealed to the meditator over time, is some sort of microscopic principle about the way perceptions work at a deeper love, right? That that there are a deeper principal there that sits below are certainly are Normal everyday awareness, but that in paying attention to the mechanics of all this stuff and not judging those mechanics, not naming those mechanics or just naming them and let them pass by, that there's some action function, some verb is revealed. And that maybe that verb, maybe the word to describe that verb, mindfulness, maybe mindfulness is is really just a verb to describe that.

I don't know, but is there anything here? And I I don't know, creating just like useless draw or if if there's actually a seed here of something real. But to me, anytime I want understand and something in biology or psychology I trained, brought in the time domain and thinking terms of verbs.

not nouns or additives yeah, yeah, yeah no uh, that's very useful and that's somewhat A J into this distinction i'm making between dualistic and non dualistic ways of experience in the world. So even daly tics, everything is still the process, right? And we're misled by the realization that now and talk gives us so.

And this supplies is not just to something like mindful this, but even to something like the self, right? So the sense of self is also a process. I think it's a verb. It's not it's we're self in more than we ourselves, right and um and there you know I even even appropriate uses of of of the term self that don't go away even when you when you recognize that the this the core subject self is illusion there there are states of self right where you you can recognize in your life that you can have a very different different modes of of being depending on the context.

So like their moments where you you're just by walking into a certain building, you sudenly transition into a different state of self, like like suddenly you pass through a door and now you're a customer in a store, right? So we know what that customer feeling is like. You're now the person who's getting the attention is a very kind of formalized type of attention from the person who is running the store and you know or a restaurant your customer in a restaurant right let's say um just just remembers of this kind of funny um that uh that was born of a mismatch of this the second but so there are uh so we we go through the you can be know you can be a student in the presence of a teacher.

You can be apparent in the presence of A A son or a daughter. You can be a spouse and presence presence for spouse and all of those shadings of like the the change in context um really does us in some fundamental psychological changes in just the states of consciousness that are available to you. And it's and some of this is really, I mean, i'm sure we can understand a lot about this being a personally and generically, but IT is pretty mysterious. And me I think there are people who I know, who I you know i'm with them in a certain way and I based on something i'm getting off of them, I can't be that i'm effortlessly one way with them and there's no way I could be that way with somebody else, right?

Like it's just I don't know it's fair mones or their their facial just the way they are their facial expression, but I mean that they're are people with whom i'm really kind of effortless lesly funny and they're people with whom, you know I couldn't even IT would never occur to me to be funny and matter what happened and and I have got long standing relationships with with these people you know it's so like it's very um you know all that very mysterious but anyway the the difference there is is not in this core sense of subject in relationship all the objects it's in kind of the the states of self and and all that is just is very verbi right like all this this pattern of changes it's a pattern of what's available and what's not available. The capacity that you that they come online or not um in in in those various context um but no the the memory I just had which I had had had a long time there was one these these moments where I realized the power of these shifts in context for states of self. So I once I was a um um a Young man, I think was I was a probably twenty two or so and single.

And like you just like trying to figure out how how you how do you meet women and like how does how does one get confident to do this well? And um I I walk into a restaurant and a kind of a woman was walking toward me, you know you toward the front door of the rest but he was walking toward me a way where I just by default assumed SHE was the hostess in the restaurant uh but he wasn't the host. st. SHE was just say, um you know someone who just eat there, I guess um so I walk through and SHE comes up as well the fun of this understanding in me that set up by literis this change in architecture.

And I and so I just said hi to her in a way that I would presumably I would say hi to any hostess who was coming up to to ask me what I wanted sit um but what had actually happened as I had said hi to a total stranger in a way that I tended at that point never to say hi the total strangers because I was shy and I was just like um but apparently I gave her like a ten thousand what hot you know hi of like like all of the confidence you would have if if you were that sort of person and IT just ushered in a complete like you this is I went to my table and this woman I came back into the restaurant, I gave me her phone number, right, which was something that was just, you have got completely foreign experience to me, know and I was based completely on my misunderstanding of the situation. I wasn't right. And so anyway.

that among the understanding ask among the misunderstandings that one can have in the action and engaging life, I that was someone of the APP one.

But but then you realize that, okay, but then there are certain people who recognize this machinery to whatever degree or have any kind of natural aptitudes for bringing certain things online or not, such that, okay, they can make these states, they can consciously make these states of self, this kind, this level of gregariousness, say, available to them in different in the circumstance, is where it's is actually useful to them.

So if you work, if you're single and you want to meet people, well is actually very helpful to to feel confident enough to just go say hi to strangers and ask them how they're doing and and to be to be you know online you know in that way where at that point of my life, in that circumstances, by hat, by default, I was going to ignore this stranger who I was passing by in the door way restaurant but thinking he was the hostess, I was engaging her you know fully um so anyway you can consciously again, this does not invoke real at all. But yes, you can consciously decide to play with these mechanisms such that you can decide you what ate states of self would be more Normative to have going to given what you want in life and and you can become increasingly you know attentive to the ways in which you get played by the world. You know, you're a kind of instrument.

Your mind is a kind of instrument, your brain is a kind of instrument that is continually getting played by the situations you are in. And you can become more of IT, an intelligent curator of your conscious states in your conscious capacity is just by noticing the changes in you. Like I I in graduate school, sometimes I talk about I think at some point in waking up this became very start for me because I had um. No, I was an old graduates to and I had taken eleven off at stanford between mysore more and junior year, right? So I like when I went .

back to school, yeah was but this is .

stanford had this you might know this um they have to stop out policy where you never really drop out. You just stop out. You're can always go back. You don't have the write letters saying that you still exist every two years as you do in other schools.

So anyway, I showed up after eleven years and but so I was really on a deadline and I felt late for everything i'm finishing my degree, you know as quick as I can um as not degree to and I jump in the graduates school and i'm an old graduates student and i'm you know there's a real sense of kind of urgency like i'm late. I should have done this earlier. I want to get this stuff done um but then nine eleven happened and I as just as I had finished my course work you know getting my my P H D I was just getting into my research.

But nine eleven intersected with my life in such a way that I just had to drop everything and write my first book and I did that and then I just had to drop everything and write my second book because of the response to the first book. And so essentially I had, like four years where I was a wall doing my PHD, but I was still had a toe in the lab, and I was still showing up occasionally. But I was becoming this kind of cautionary tale from the point of you, a grad school.

But I was also becoming kind of famous or send my famous writer because my first book had been uh, in new york times the best seller and I just I was I was getting some notorieties a writer and if I was doing things like, you know, I was giving a ted talk but I still hadn't finish graduate school right so like I was just IT was I think that time is right maybe I had just finished graduate school when I get the had talk but um anyway so I was in the rowing in two boats and one boat was thinking or you know showing every sign of of being damaged and and I was literally like know getting letters from the head of the department saying, no I we're concerned about you but on the other hand I was like becoming a causey celebrity in that world too least in the world that was overlap in so I was having the experience of like going in the moment where this Crystalized ed with for me and in a 对 peculiar way。 Was I had a meeting in IT like three o'clock with my adviser who was just the sky mark coin in the brain map in center and uc, I was a fantastic guy um great advisor uh I did I did not exact as much wisdom from him as I should have um brilliant scientist and you know he's for him. I'm late right at least in my head I heat it's not that he was right to me so heart but like in my head, I am very self conscious about how i'm not living up his own expectations at this point.

So I haven't meaning with him like three o'clock and i'm just kind of willing you know under my you know his gaze and my own imagined inner gaze of his um you know but that two hours later I have a meeting with his boss you know a dinner meeting with his boss who wants to meet with me to get advice on launching his book we have the same publisher but i'm like the much bigger author at norton you know and he's he's coming to me for advice um and so i'm rick ashamed between two diametrically opposite self states that are again this comes down to architecture is literally like the data I was in walking into one building and then leaving and walking into another building on the same campus um and they were completely opposite self concepts like in one in in one context i'm a fuck up. In another context i'm a celebrity and you have .

mastery and virtual city and here and we're developing IT very .

quickly yeah and and but so again, this is the kind of a stark version of that, but everyone has some version of this just in bouncing between talking to their mom and then talking to a their best friend and then talk in to a stranger and and talking to someone who's who's very successful, talking to someone who's not very like, oh, you notice your vulnerability to all of this stuff.

And ultimately, what you want is a level of psychological integrity that that is truly divorced from that now that you are not i'm not saying you're ever gonna IT perfect. Know this always gonna some. I mean, I I I can't I can't talk about the ultimate fulfilment of this process like i'm not a booter.

I'm not saying I I finished the project, but um I think there is more and more you you know as you become sensitive to these changes and you become sensitive to what is like to actually not be psychologically reactive and and not be definable by your own self concept, your own you're not identifying with anything. You're not hanging your hat on anything. You're not thinking about yourself in terms in in in the kind of terms that you would export to others and then care about what they think about you, right?

Like there's a kind of involved nerve body that that arises that's not born of being well defended, its born of of being evaporated, right? You're no longer keeping score in those ways. Once again.

where the I really appreciate that description because these days I am really intrigued um something we known for a long time that i'm you're certainly familiar with. The prefrontal cortex is ability to establish context dependent rule sets stroop task will be basic exam ple of reading numbers are letters on on cards and then switching to having to report the colors that the letters and numbers are writing in is a basic task, but prove on the context, obviously important for setting context dependent fought and behavior and directed action.

And and but within the context of all these different variations of the self, depending on graduate school or you know, relationship or sitting alone in one's room, yeah, there are different rule sets arise. But and somehow we are able to have a sense, a coherent sense of self that encompasses all of those functional people, can a toko between them as needed and not overlap them and appropriately, at least not to extend that it's career fAiling or life fAiling. Although there are sad examples of that many of which exist in um the twitter space, I know several colleagues not directly in mine, but people who through mistakes made with their phones where they forgot context or forgot to realize that the context on social media is near infinite.

But the context that has existed in their head might not be clear in the way that they communicate something and they lost their jobs by saying what were perceived as in sensitive things in some cases more in fact offensive, insensitive things in some cases is debatable right? Um in any case I think that the the image that now comes to mind or related to something you said times that um it's not about eliminating something, it's about revealing that something was never actually there. And then in terms of sensor experience and this these different aspects of the self had the image, in my mind, not an experience school by diver, but i've done enough of IT one of wet suit.

You wear a complete wet suit with the hood. And this idea, you know, if you were born into that wet suit, you might think that, no, you you know no job, lean up against the wall and you experience IT one way, right? And but we're you to shed that wet suit, you will get well.

There's this incredible landscape of some at a sensory experience that I had no idea that goes way beyond levels of sensitivity right now, your time about flying to point discrimination and light strokes. And this could be positive or negative pain in otherwise too. But what you describe in is essentially that the wester was never really there IT, but was created through a series of of action steps.

And what I think what were migrant orty is a of um for most non intuitive or non reflective action steps that revealed to us that in fact we're not wearing this wet suit. Now you raised one topic which I I think is analogous to this, what to which is this notion of distraction. The Normal distraction is masking what would otherwise be a Better experience of life.

I can think of distraction as falling into two different bins. One would be the kind of distraction that is internally generate, like the fact that thoughts arise and pull me down, different allways and avenues of my, of my brain and my thoughts and my experience. And then the other would be, and and that would compete with my ability to really focus on something.

And then another form of distraction, which captures my ability to focus intensely, but has been focusing on the wrong things. And here I think the judgment of wrong is reasonable to include different, since i'm being impulsively yanked to something on social media and being impossible vely yank to someone else's pain and experience, and somehow confusing that with my own experience. This is an empathy, but just think yangs around my attention as a spot lives can like over here, over there.

I'm not feeling as if i'm the one standing behind that spot light controlling you or i'm not the spotlight is to keep with the what we've been building up here. So could you tell us a little bit about distraction and tell me whether not these two forms are in any way accurate or inaccurate to be happy for them to to be inaccurate, and whether not there are other forms of distraction that we need to be on the look out for? And again, I think what most people are seeking is what is the way to not just enhance our ability to focus, but to shed this wet suit like clock that limits are experienced, that i'm calling and that .

you've called distraction. Yeah, I get like this. Traction is one component of the the other aspect of IT is identification with thought and identity. This is the feeling of self is bound up in the sense that that i'm i'm the thinker. I'm the one attending.

I'm the one vulnerable on the interview of the inner humongous that's vulnerable to experience um and think I can be gratified by IT or not and it's constantly trying to improve IT or mitigate negative aspects of IT um is the sense that there is kind of A A writer on the horse of consciousness is supposed to just consciousness and its contents so again, IT rides a top. This illusion of control it's so to go away back to to the question you ask about just what is you know what I recommend as a starting point for for meditation um. Some of your assumptions are in fact true.

Yeah it's um you know often recommend the big inning. People close their eyes and do a sitting tracks of and is different from a walking practice and you can do both but people tend to start you sit in with their eyes closed. But again, ultimately, where this is going is it's not an art of meditation.

Properly recognize is not an artist that you're add into your life. It's not it's not even a practice IT. IT is less rather than more. You and and therefore, IT is also coincident with every potentially every waking moment. There's nothing there's nothing that you can do with your attention once you know how to meditate.

That in principle excludes meditation because meditation is just A A recognition of intrinsic character of consciousness in each moment and all you have in each moment is consciousness and its contents, whatever you're doing. So um so in the beginning, you you know you you'll be very deliberate and precious about deciding to practice meditation. And you'll decide ten minutes in the morning and you'll and and it'll seem very different from the next ten minutes when you're you know spilling out to your to do list and you're you're trying to figure out know what the day looks like, right?

But ultimately, you want to erase this boundary between formal practice and the rest of life such that there is is just not remotely stable and and um and that that's that's achievable. And and I think you from the very beginning you can relax this conceptual distinction between meditation and its antithesis. Because it's not it's not at the level of anything you're doing is the level is at the level of what's happening in your relationship to thought you know like what can you notice when you know like is the transition from the by stable percept?

You know you're looking at the at the um the image and you seen nothing I will say know the domain just the spot on the paper and you just you don't see you don't and then all of sudden the dome or the face of jesus or whatever the images pops out and then you see that is the transition from nothing to something right that you the practice becomes the transition from being lost in thought and then waking up and break, you know, very much like breaking the spell of thought, identification with thought is very much like waking up from a dream and having it's like that that transition the whole like you having a dream. And this couple of things are true there. I mean, IT really is a kind of a it's a psychosis that is just not we don't problems ze because you're safely in bed and you're not moving or less.

You ve got some kind of a sleep disorder. You're not walk around harm in yourself for anybody else so but to be in bed and to not know IT and to think your you know running along a beach or you know your getting tried for murder and a quarter of law or whatever the thing is that you're completely delusional about, right? That is psychosis, right? And it's like you're fundamentally unaware of your circumstances.

And then you there two things can happen there. You can either become losted within the dream, right, which is interesting and that's a whole as a whole phenomenology of that which um can be practiced. But more commonly you can just wake up from the dream and all of the sun. The problem you thought you had is no longer there and and you have a completely different context for your conscious life like now you know you're in bit you're safely in bed all all the while.

There really is something analogous when you break this identification with thought, right? You're just you're having a thought that seems to be some kind of you know a moral or psychological emergency and and yeah you can you can the moment you see daylight around, at the moment you see that that the mind is larger than than this mere appearance, right? Then you have to suddenly you have a degree of freedom that that a moment ago was just unthinkable, right? And you're also, you recognize you sof come to in a way you recognize your circumstance in a way that you weren't a moment ago when you were just talk to yourself when you were just identical to that conversation.

Um so it's all all to say that ultimately meditation and again, there's another apparent paradox here. Many people don't know much about meditation, will say things like, you know, what you know for me of running is my meditation, or skin, or rock climbing, or a plane, the guitar or something they like to do that gives them an experience of flow. That's what, that's what they go to, to feel Better.

And that that's the opposite of all the in the chaos of their lives or the they're time on twitter. Whatever is virtually every case is is not true to say that that is effectively meditation. You're not going to by learning to play the guitar, you're not going to learn what i'm call in meditation, and you're not going to learn IT by your cycling and or get getting really how good you get at any of those things. You're not going to learn IT by doing those things.

But paradoxically, when not really, but I can see like a paradoxes, once you know how to meditate, then you can meditate, doing all of those things, right? Meditations totally compatible with playing the guitar skin, doing any ordinary thing you like to do, right? So once you know how to meet today, and again, it's totally natural in the beginning to formalize IT and to set aside time each day to do IT because he is a IT is a training that means something that in the beginning you have to get used to.

But once you have once you're getting used to IT, then there is no good reason not to be experiencing this thing. I'm calling meditation this this insight into the deep, the lessons of consciousness that the the non cell food of conscious ness. Um you should experience that when you are playing your favorite sport or when you're having a conversation with somebody.

And then the reason then to come back to your initial assumption about ice closed, a lot of practice, even formal practice, can be done eyes open. And it's important to do IT eyes open because so much of our anchor of our sense of self is is based on visual cues. I mean, like we just we we know that you, if you give people the right visual cues, you can translate their sense of self.

If you can give them an out of body experience of a with a video display where you can literally make them feel like you go, there's a body swap in illusion. You can make them, you can make them feel that there are another person's body looking back at their body. If you, if you run, the camera is the right way.

I've done this in VR. Seeing an image of of you, they create an avatar for you and then you're badly movements, generate the movements of the avatar AR and you start gaining presence as they call IT and they are lingo very quickly and then pretty soon um you lose sense of your own bodily representation and and it's a little what's curious to me is i'm going back into of course, never left, but back into your actual body when the VR goggles pop off, the world seems almost overwhelming. The number of sensory stimuli are in like a laboratory room, which is actually quite sparse. So exactly what you describe this translocation of of notions of self through visual experience.

But conversely, when you lose the sense of self, the sense self i'm talking about, IT can be especially vivid and and silent with eyes open because because so so many of your reference points to self hood are delivered visually, right? Especially in the social situations like you i'm talking to you, you're looking back at me, right? So you're the implication of your gaze is that i'm over here behind my face implicated by your gates like so the sense that you are looking at something is the sense of self in that social context, right? And so and if you if you're facial expression changes, like i'm saying something and if you kind of furrow your brow, like what's the health you and I can read into that facial change, some inter state of yours that is you selling to me over sun we've got this sort of dance of like i'm noticing you reacting to me and i'm that's that's changing the way i'm feeling about what that's that you know the the preview of you know every arrows everyone didn't want, right?

And every relationship I had a girlfriend, I was a post that who is who was very, very SHE was brilliant, really still is.

And SHE was said that every relationship the reference is, is there four arrow used just in her scientists? Still is and said, you know, there's the era of, you know, he was talking to me so he said to me to you and kind of what you perceive coming for me and then there's you to me and then there's an error from the middle going right back out at each one of us, which is our own perception of what the other person is thinking about us. And it's feeding back on the other ero.

And he came in this very clear, but model of basically relationships. The relationship failed, but IT was good while IT lasted, I should say. And but the four arrow model of relationships actually shows up in every type of one one, one of relationship and is probably an under description of of the total number of arrows. But as I think it's exactly you describe, is that perception of cell through the eyes of other, whether not we're impatient or not, strongly shapes the way that we access different context dependent rule sets about what we're gonna and say it's a very dynamic, right? Yeah.

but the freedom that I think we want and and people can sometimes experience this, just have hazard. But the thing the center of the bullseye, from the meditated point of view, is to get off that ride entirely. And to so so that losing the sense of self in this context of of a social is to, is to give up your face essentially like you are like. So and what what that entails is or what that gives you is the free attention to actually just pay attention to the other person and the other person is now no longer quite an object in the world for you.

There is really just a kind of a totality of which that person is a part um and actually in a Martin buber the the kind of mystic jewish philosopher uh talked about the kind of the I vw relationship and this I think is know I spent long time and like red buber but and I don't know if he goes you know far enough to be truly non dualistic but this distinction between I I am now um because the value part of IT is is uh I think potentially this or I am again it's been several decades since I read read him but. There's there's a there's a way of beholding in another person where you have the free attention to simply behold them, right? You like you're no log.

You you no longer care what they think about you. You don't feel neuronal ally implicated by their gaze. You don't feel you're simply the space in which they're appearing, right? And so you're free.

You like like there's just there's no and and people can feel and so you're you by definition, you are no longer self conscious, right? And when and this phrase self conscious ness really does get out this, what i'm call in the self, that the elusive self as a kind of contraction. And and you can, you can notice this for yourself. Just imagine what is like to go from not being self conscious to suddenly be in self conscious. And the proximate cause of this, you know, almost variably, is suddenly recognizing that somebody y's looking at you, right, like you in a starbucks and you you're alone and you're read in the newspaper, whatever is this is that now sounds highly and acronym.

It's been three years since i've held the physical newspaper, I think in a starbuck um but you know you you you're just mind your own business and you look up and you know just you're seen you know a room full of strangers but then you notice that someone is just looking at you, you know and so like that moment of eye contact, right suddenly that throws you back on yourself as a kind of suddenly you're the object in in the world for the other person. That recognition is a the tightening there, the of contraction there is a, is A A A further ramification of this this feeling most of us have most of the time of being the center of experience, like the time, the place you feel like like it's it's like, you know, we're all walking around with a fist. And in moments of self consciousness, the fisk is really tight, you know, and that and that some, that's the thing that gets fully relaxed when you discover this, this, what various points called the nature of mind, or the non dual nature of consciousness, is just that there is no center to this experience.

And when you recognize no center, then even when your gaze is aimed at another person's s gaze, there is no implication going back to the center because there is no center, right. And rather than that being an experience of weird detachment or confusion or or it's is actually an experience of greater relationship because you're no longer you no longer defend you're not defending anything over here like you're not are not braced against anything. You're just the space in which that person is showing up.

And so it's it's a it's a an experience of being much more comfortable in in the present of another person in whatever your relationship because you're not contracting, right? And then when you do when you have that again, and this is meditation. This is meditation that is totally compatible with having a conversation with somebody.

And then when you notice yourself contracting, like when you notice you're not doing you're not meditating anymore, you're just you're actually reacting like they just said something or look a certain way. And now you cast back upon yourself in relationship to them, that becomes a kind of mindfulness alarm right then you know that that IT IT becomes likely the the unsatisfactory ss of that psychologically becomes more and more silent, right? And it's um because that's not one that's not the way you want to be.

I mean like like get the antithesis of IT been as as comfortable as you are a moment ago but too it's it's something you're doing unnecessarily right. I like you you you're like again, you're making a fist when you don't have to make a fist, right and and it's um again, you can leave aside all those circumstances where it's appropriate to react to someone and um i'm into martial arts and self defence and yes, you're not supposed to be just this puddle of goo out in the world who can be just mistreated by people never put up no resistance. But it's psychologically even if even if a state like anger or contraction is sometimes Normative and appropriate.

The question is, how long is a Normal tive and appropriate for? How long do you want to stay angry for? In my experience, this is kind of classical negative emotions like anger and fear are appropriate as silence cues.

You know, they they only you to know an emergency or a potential emergency but then in dealing with the emergency there almost never the state you want to be. You know it's like you don't you like it's Better to actually become in an emergency, you know. So absolutely .

I think that um and again, the languages is insufficient to describe what what you're telling us but I think what comes to mind for me is this distinction between situation awareness and self awareness and we need both but under conditions of the a emergency, true emergency or motivated desire, we need to dale down the amount of self awareness in order to be more effective within the situation rareness, but you said something very important.

My life has been working on fear like states for a long time. I'm going confess i'm going going to rob this from you. But i'll credit you every time I describe as that that the that, the the fear, the threat detection state or set of events access as flag, but is not meant to persist in the way that the flag went up if one is to be in their most adaptive state.

Actually, jacco, William and I were talking about this. He has a lot about detachment and open gaze, things that my interested in visual system and automatic interaction so wide, broadening the gaze literally broads the time domain of thinking. And you ve come up with new solutions to complex problems in real time and so on.

And and you're describing everyday set of interactions where that could be very useful. And yet there seems to be something about the way you describe meditation and what you've managed to arrive at and what practitioners of meditation can arrive at, which is something more than that like IT. It's not just about being affected or optimizing all the language we see thrown around a lot in the space that I live in these days, but but something fundamentally more important about how to experience life in the self.

This realization that what you thought was there isn't never really there there, but that there are constraints that limit that. And so to try and fracture those constraints one by one, would you say that meditation, as a practice done for a few minutes each day with the APP that is a kind of a step function, is a very nonlinear AR in terms of people's progress. You know, i'm certainly going to go start doing more meditation based on this discussion, truly, because anytime someone describes that there is kind of a myth that we've been living in, I, I become obsessed with the idea of dissolving that.

Yh that's a very seductive. So thank you for using that one. There is no Better marketing tool, which is I what you're not trying to do here, but that's through me to capture my my efforts. You tell me that there's a myth that i'm living in and that IT can be dissolved and that opens up a Better landscape. yeah.

What is the process like is, do some people make progress very quickly? Do some people experience on of step functions towards progress? Or what is that meditation practice look like over time? Do you still meditator? Do you have you just thread IT through your judge so you're writing your daily life, your coffee, your time with your wife? Is that .

yeah also to come back to to talk with the myth first, second. So there really what you just announced was kind of a second door way into this whole project, like the usual door, is through the door of suffering, the lack of a Better word.

And people feel unhappy in a variety of ways, and they get more sensitize to the mechanics of their own unhappiness and meditation be is one of the things on the menu that is is explicit build as a remedy for for unhappiness and ah and IT is and I know I think that's probably the most common path to this, but another path is just intellectual interest and we just wanted to know was real. So about the mind subjectively know that in the first person way and and there there's no contradiction between those two things I motivated by both of them but um yeah it's totally valid door way into this. There are definitely step functions.

I would say there there at least two, I mean, and IT, they really articulated along the lines of of the framework i've been describing of of dualistic and non daly's tic mindfulness, right? So in the beginning, you're going to start out, you know, ninety nine point nine percent of people start out dualistic ally, paying attention and and noticing the difference between distracted by thought and then being on the object of attention, whether the breath or sounds or whatever. And eventually that, you know, that opens up to all possible objects of attention, including thoughts.

And there's still this fluctuation between being distracted and then being a mindful of whatever. And the fact that is open to all possible objects differentiates this type of practice from anything that is narrow ly focused on one object like a montreal or a visualization or society you know those are other paths of practice that are more concentration based um and interesting. But the the benefit of mindfulness is that very quickly you realized is by definition compatible with all possible experience because you're not artificially contract in your attention down to something. You're you're just being aware of the next thing, a site, a sound, a taste, I thought um so the first step function is a very clearly experience, the difference between being lost and thought and being clearly aware of any part of experience, including thought and to notice the freedom they compared, the psychological freedom that gives you, right?

So you can like you, something is made you angry and now you're thinking about all the reasons why you should be angry and have every right to be angry and what you're going to tell that person when you see them, and then you notice you're thinking, right? And you notice the connection between the thought and the anger, right? You like like the the minute spent, lost in thought about what's making you angry is the thing that dragged through the physiology of anger, right? And the moment you notice that once you're mindful, once you can be mindful, you can notice thought as thought and how quickly that dissipates, that just the language in the image rages you.

You couldn't hold on to IT if you want to to. And then you notice the physiology of the anger is just this, you kind of meaningless, uh, no can inner incan descent, but has its own half life, and degrades very, very quickly. When you're no longer of thinking about the reasons why you should be angry, you can hold onto the anger.

The anger itself dissipates, right? And from from the point of view of the one who is being mindful, this is tremendous relief and and a minimum, it's a degree of freedom. You can, at that point decide, well, how long do I want to be angry for? right? Is a useful to stay angry.

I want to be angry for one minute, two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes or because but before you have that capacity to be mindful, you're going to hopelessly be as angry as you're going to be for as long as you're going to be. That just based on the the time course, if you're thinking about IT road, about IT telling your wife about IT, actually just that you know it's just going to be this conversation based missed venture in you know negative state of mind. Uh and you are you are going to be the hostage of that for as long as you will be the hostage of that.

You have nothing you can do apart from just decide to, you know check out and watch game of thrones again for the third time, right? Like it's just you can divide t your attention to something else, which is are you sometimes a good thing to do, but mindfulness, even dollar mindfulness, gives you this capacity to just the mechanics of this and then get off the ride when you whenever you want. So that really is a step function.

Like first, there was a time when the time before you can do that, and then there's a time after which you can do that. The other step function is noticing that there is no one who is doing that. I mean, this the non duality, the selflessness, the the center lessons of awareness, right, the fact that there is no place from which the minds this is being aimed, but the fact that is just this open condition in which everything is appearing, thoughts included to to have you at at that point your mindfulness no longer becomes, it's no longer this this daly's c effort to strategically pay attention to anything as supposed to being lost and thought.

It's just what's left when thoughts, when, when, when they present, recognize thought on ravels even before IT unravels. What's recognize is you are simply identical to the condition in which everything is appearing. Again, this is not a i'm not making A A A depart chopra like metaphysical claim about the mind. This is not i'm not saying the mind isn't what the brain is doing, and i'm not saying that you're recognizing the consciousness that gave birth to the universe and not not make any broad claims s about metaphysics.

I'm just talking about as a matter of experience, there is just this condition in which everything is appear right and what you're calling your body again as a matter of experience, i'm not saying that we can have third person conversations about, you know, physical bodies in the physical world. But as a matter of experience, the only body you're ever going to directly encounter as your own is an appearance and consciousness or so consciousness is not in your body. What you're calling your body is in consciousness.

And visually proper accept vely is like everything is just appearing in this condition. And again, you're not aiming ing you're not this is not a spotlight that you're aiming at the body or at you know there's just this condition in which everything, including anything you could call yourself disappearing and um so yeah so that the second step function is to recognize that this is all this is already true. Conscious is already without this thing you've been calling your ego hope in and you know hoping to to unravelled IT through meditation.

Conscious ness is not going to get any more self less, any more alist, any freer than IT always already is recognized as such. And and so that's that's the the step function at that point is your mindful one is at that point the thing you come back to when you're no longer distracted is that that recognition again again and then IT becomes yeah IT becomes compatible with anything you would do. And so they answer your question, yes, I still practice formally sometimes you frequently, but not I definitely miss days and I don't do IT for I mean that I I I don't rule out the possibility that will go back on retreat at first time just to check in with that and see if that makes a difference.

But um you know I you know attend to set for um attended. I i've designed my life so that I can spend a lot of time meditating without having to be formally meditating and and like so you know i'll go for a hike for two hours, right? And what i'm doing, what i'm hiking is identical to what i'm doing, what i'm quote meditating in a chair of, you know doing nothing but meditate um so it's um yeah I mean I just get the i'm very i'm very interested in a race in the boundary between what people are call in meditation and and the rest of life.

And so in teaching these things, I tend to emphasize out from the beginning because I I think it's is very easy to set up um to get to get gold by a bunch of assumptions that that caused you to be very split in your sense of what your life is about. And i'm sort of banking my meditation over here because i'm meditating two hours a day dillion gently, and this can be really good for me. And then over here is the rest of my life, which is not nearly as wise or useful, or is like, this is the stuff that is still the area of my problems, and I think is useful to recognized.

You've got one, you've got one life, you know. And if you've got this, this this single condition of consciousness and its contents in every mode of life, and there's something to recognize about IT, and you're always free to recognize that. And truly, even in your dreams, right, is just not IT never stops. So that's that's what I tend emphasize.

So earlier you told us that meditation is not about changing the content of conscious experience. And in a different podcast that you were on, heard you say something to the effective that Normally we are in our daily experience. And unless we are trained in meditation, unless we've dissolved this illusion of the gap between actor and self and observer, that we require certain sensory events to create collisions within us and with the natural world, that sort blast us into a different mode of being.

I want to use that as a way to frame up this idea that some things, such as psychotic alics, but also a very long hike, a very long fast know, who knows a bank wit, know different types of life experiences, do exactly the opposite of what your describing meditation does, which is that they actively change the content of our conscious experience, so much so that we often remember those for the rest of our lives. Could you tell us why psychedelic can be useful and hear out? Give the coffee.

Ots, that maybe you will feel obligated to give as well, but this we're talking about you safely and responsibly, age appropriate, context appropriate, ideally with some clinical or other type of guidance, legality issues. Obey IT said. All that stated, IT was psychotic. Ex to me, are an experience of altered perception internal and external perception, altered space time relationship somewhat dream like I think he was Allan hobson at harvard for a long time talking about the relationship between psychiatric c like states and dream like states um because of this distortion of the space time dimensionality and I haven't experimented with the much um i've been part of a clinical trial three doses of him dma which certainly altered the quality of my conscious experience in ways that LED to a lot of last and at least for me, valuable learning yeah so what what are your thoughts about psychiatric in terms of how they interact with the discussion that we've been having? And what utility do they play in recognition of the cell for and other sorts of brain changes?

Well so yeah just pricing all those cabyles ts that people can anticipate. Um these drugs are not without their risks and is it's one problems that we have this single term drugs or psychiatric x which names many different types of substance. Ces, and they're not all the same and they're not so like m dma is not even technically a psychiatric I think he has an immense therapy value. And IT actually was my gateway drug to this this whole area of concern.

Feminine pathogen.

right? It's of an effete .

meana pathogen.

Yes, it's often in. It's it's been called um but IT doesn't tend to change perception in the way that classic psychiatrically do and it's it's it's also serious logic but it's it's not um uh IT has to be in some part differently so then me even elastin and Sullivan, which are much more similar and and classic psychodeviant s both are also serves an ergimo. They're not merely so and they are they're also different.

And and the higher those you take of these drugs, the more you at lower dose is everything to seem the same and higher doses they they they begin to diverge. And we can talk about the the pharmacology if you wanted to. But um the I would just say that for many of us is certainly for me psychodeviant were indispensable in the beginning, improving to me that this was the first person interrogation of the mind was worth doing because I was somebody who know agit seventeen or eighteen before I had any real experience with with M D M A or alley or still aside. And if you had taught me how to meditate at that point, I think I would have just bounced off the whole project. I think my mind was I was just I was so um cerebral in my just my engagement with anything.

I was so skeptical of any of the the spiritual, the religious and spiritual traditions that that have given us most of our meditation talk you know um that I think I just would have um I know many of these people like know I have I have tried to teach you know Richard dock and timestamp danel than to ambush them with meditation and both both in a group set in and one and one uh not not done but uh but Richard I I I am pushed on my own power gas with a guide of meditation and he just know from heat he closed his eyes. He looks inside and there's nothing of interest to see right like just it's like is not he doesn't have the the um the conceptual interest in him that would that would cause him to to persist long enough to find out that there's there there right now this is not a problem with L D or silica I N M D M A and I know that if I gave him one hundred micrograms balas day or five grams of of mushrooms, twenty twenty five little grams of sales and um as probably not the analyst dosage to the five grams of mushrooms, five grams of mushrooms will be more than that. Um I forget what IT is of of empty ma maybe one hundred and twenty milgram the map is which is .

the one that's under clinical trials is one hundred and twenty five milligrams with the option of a thousand .

five million m reman strange the fact that comes to hand. Um but there's there's just no possibility that nothing's gona happen right now. Something with with a psychiatric with M D M A. Most people tend to have certainly any kind of guy and tend to have a very positive pro social experience.

Um but you know with a psychiatric you might have A A A M H someone know terrifying experience if you have, quote, a bad trip, you know and i've certainly those experiences on on last day and and to some, but the prospect that nothing is gna happen is just a million and nearly a million cases out of a million, just not in the court. I am neurophysiology ics. Something's gone to happen with the red was a dose of of of one of these drugs.

And if if that thing that happens is is psychologically at all Normative and a pleasant and interesting in and valuable which IT is so much at the time and certainly under the appropriate you set and setting and guidance um IT can be a lot of the time for vision. Everybody again, there are cabyles ts if if you're prone if you think you have you know a procured ity for schizophrenia or you know bipolar disorder, this is almost certainly not for you you know anyone doing IT the the studies like john hopkins for for the therapy effects of of any these drugs. They are they're ruling out people with you know first degree relatives with with any these clinics conditions.

um. But so for somebody like me at eighteen who didn't know that this was an area of of not only interest, but would be the the center of gravity for the rest of his life, if only he could pay attention clearly enough to see that you could be right um I was someone who very likely, again, I don't know, I don't have the count of actual in hand. I don't know what would have happened if if someone had forced me to meditate for an hour at that point.

But I know I was interested in IT until I took him dma. I know I wasn't having these kinds of experience spontaneously that heck that showed me that there was an inner landscape that was worth expLoring um I was a very hard headed skeptic who was very interested in lots of things, but there was no alternative to me just thinking more about those things, right? I mean, idea that there are some other way of grass being cognitively at the interest in parts of the world beyond thinking about the world, I just like that just wouldn't have computed for me at all, right? And if you had, so I just, and I literally have I, no one ever gave me a book to read.

Or and I have had, I don't I, if you, the now meditation very likely meant absolutely nothing to me before, before I took my first dose, this case with M D M A. Um so what the drug experience did for me is IT just proved. And so the one of limitations of a drug is that, you know, obviously, no matter how good the experience the drug wears off and then you're back to you more and more less your usual reform. And now you have a memory of the experience. And I can be a fairly dim memory.

And some of these experiences are so discontinuous with Normal waking conscious ness that IT can be like trying to remember a dream you that just disappear that degrades, know, over the course of seconds and then IT could have been the most intense dream you've ever had and for whatever reason, you can barely get a purchase on, you know what I was about and um you know there are some psychology experiences that are analysis to that but for most people most of the time there's a resolution of this experience and with something like empty may they can be a quite vivid um where you recognize okay there there was a way of being that is quite different than what i'm tending to access by default. And IT is different in in ways that are just you obviously Better and and psychologically more healthy and is is possible to be healthy psychologically in a way that I I never imagined right? And then when you be then when you linked IT up to the traditional literature around any of this stuff, again, so much of IT is shot through with with superstition and other worldly ss of a religion.

And you know, as you know, and I think you're the listeners, probably no, you've spent a lot of time criticized in all that, but there is a baby in the bath water to all of that, right? I guess not that somebody like jesus or the boda or any of the matriarch and patriarch of the world's religions, it's not that they are were all conscious frauds or you know temporal epileptics or like there's a there's a pathological lens that you can put on top of all that. But once you have one of these experiences on psychodeviant s or on a drug like empty ma, you know that there's a there there, you know that unconditional love is is a possibility, right? You know that that a feeling truly one with nature, right? I mean, just so one with nature that you could spend ten hours in front of a tree and find that to be the most rewarding experience of your of your life, right? That's a possible state of conscious ness.

Now IT may not be the state of conscious ence you want all the time. You don't want to be the crazy guy by the tree, you know who can have a conversation about anything else. But uh, once you have one of these experiences as you recognize, okay, there's there's some reason why i'm not having the biotin c vision right now and I can't even figure out how to aim my attention so as to have anything like IT.

And that's a problem, right? Because it's it's available, right? And it's it's the best you know, IT is among the best things has ever happened to me, right? And now I can just only dimly remember what that was like. So how do I get back there on some level? And that seems that that invites, again, a logic of changes, a logic of seeking changes in the contents of conscious ness which sets someone up for this this protracted or seemingly protracted and a fairly frustrating search to you game their nervous system so as to have those kinds of experiences more and more um and again, it's not that that in principle fruitless, but IT is from the point of view of the kind of the core insight of, you know the core wisdom of, you know what I would take from a tradition like boot m, which is not know not the only tradition that has given voice to this but it's I would argue is given a voice to the in the most particular way um again, leaving aside any of the superstition and and other worldly ss and miracles that no, we don't have to talk about at the moment and you certainly don't need to endorse in order to be interested in this stuff.

And so that the the by vacation between the all of the utility of psychodeviant s and what i'm talking about under the rubric of meditation is at this point of, okay, once you realized, is that there there, what do you do? And what's the logic by which you had to do IT and as possible, like if if your only framework is the good experiences, the good fields you had on on whatever drug IT was and A A further discussion of of like what that path of changes can look like and that can become in a religious context. They can come in just a purely psychology context, or some combination of the two.

I think you can be misled to you can just be you can be misled to just seek lots of peak experiences. You just trying to string together a lot of peak experiences, hoping they are going to change you, every one of which by by definition is going to be in permanent, right? It's it's first IT wasn't there, then is there and then is no longer there and then you've got a memory of IT, right? The quite what I think is what everyone really wants, whether they know what or not, and their right to want, is a type of freedom that is compatible with even ordinary states of consciousness, which which can ride along with them into extraordinary states of consciousness.

And so I hadn't done psychotic alics for twenty five years because I made, again, they were super useful for me in the beginning. Then I discovered meditation on the basis of of those experiences, got really into meditation and realize, okay, this is a much more, this really is the conceptual. This makes much more sense to me.

This is delivering the goods. You know, in terms of my experience um there is no need to keep having these you seeking these peak experiences with drugs. But I had been a twenty five years since I done that and and there was this resurgence in research on psychiatric.

And I was being asked about psychiatric x, and I was talking about their utility for me. But again, these were distant memories. And so, and there was also one type of psychology experience.

I I was aware that I had never had. I had never done a high dose of mushrooms, blind fulled, you know, like every every mushroom trip i'd ever had. I'd been out in nature and interacting with been a very transformed sensory experience of the world and of other people.

But i'd never done in alone in blind fall that just purely inwardly directed and at high dosage I don't hde doses of L C but um but not mushrooms um so I did that you and I was very useful and I I I I spoke about IT on my podcast and it's actually there's I I think if you search sam Harris mushroom trip on youtube, you get the the nineteen nine minute version of that. My describe in that trip, IT was incredibly useful. And but IT was double useful was my mindful is training in the context of that explosion of sententia.

I mean, he was such an overwhelmingly strong experience um and there are so many moments where I could have gone one way or the other based on my sense of just okay i'm going to try to resist this if was like IT IT IT was in truth irresistible because I was just so much but there were moments where I was aware of okay. This is like letting go of self in this context is is the thing that is going to turn to make the difference between heaven and hell here you and because experiences that are so extreme that you can even tell if it's agg and your ecstasy is just, it's just this, everything is turned up to eleven, right? And in the difference between the two is like, you know, the tipping point is just is really is of a highway react in some sense, you know, you can just fall to one side of the other and um yeah so what I think people want is they certain ly want to be able to extract from the psychedelic c experience wisdom that is applicable to ordinary states of consciousness.

Like what is the thing you can realize in a moment of having a conversation with your child that isn't distracting you from that relationship, is not a memory of when the world dissolved or you when you were distinguish from the sky. But it's just a way, a way of be having free attention and unconditional love in this, you know, totally ordinary and potentially chaotic human experience, you know, which can be psychologically fraught and you can meet, you know, iterations of yourself that you don't like that that are not equipped you to be the best possible person in that relationship. And what we want to do is cut through all of that and actually, you know being love with our lives and with the people in our lives more and more the time.

And um that there's i'm not saying that the psycho that repeats psychiatric journeys aren't can be integral to that project but but you know that a that the project can be being high all the time, right? So whatever is extractable from that the the occasional psychic delic trip has got to be mable into ordinary waking consciousness and the point of the real point of contact does kind of run through this. Know what i've been called in in the illusion of the self.

And again, IT is that part is discoverable without any changes in contents, right? So you don't have to suddenly feel the energy of your body, be rush out. Be continuous with the the ocean of energy that is not your body, right? Like that's an experience that there to be had, right? There's no doubt. But this the truth is just looking at this cup is just as formless and as mysterious as that right went, seen in the right way. And that, and that's that's what meditation encouragers, you know, want to recognize .

what share the experience that CDMA significantly altered my perception of what's possible in terms of an emotional stance towards self and others, yeah, including animals, right? Something that runs very deep for me and that I had been kind of actively suppressing in anticipation put my dog down but also i'm not I don't know how to frame IT except that that you know my lab did animal research for years and I was always very conflicted about IT yeah because I love animals and that I won't understand the brain and we need to work on animal al brains .

and we rode um yeah .

i'll be very direct about this my laborat i've worked on, many species i've worked on. Micon rats i've worked on um immediately i've worked on I done some cat experiments. I've worked on large non human primates and including the cache um I no longer work on any of those species um i've worked on cuttle fish sample pots a discussion for another time brilliant little creatures maybe maybe as smart as us, or who knows, maybe smarter.

And now I work on humans because I couldn't reconcile the chAllenge inside me, which was my love of animals and working on them. I just couldn't do IT any longer. Yeah and M, D, M, A, and set that transition.

That transition actually had been set a lot. Lier was something I really grappled with. I didn't keep me up at night, but he was always in the back of my mind, right? In any event, I hope what we discovered was was worthwhile.

But this is that's a bigger debate, and i've strong feelings about this and maybe it's a topic for another podcast, but i'm very happy that now I work on humans and they can tell me if they want to be part of the experiment or not and and trust them, and I trust their answers. I think that md ma in this role is and pathetic, and I think really did set up an understanding of what's real and true. So think truth like that, because they don't.

I felt that they didn't hit me square in the face. I just could. The feeling behind the conflict made itself evident, and what to do about IT made itself evident. So I suppose that dma did did assist the transition to purely human research, as opposed to and more research. The other thing that I know that is, is IT made IT not scary to confront things that were scary to confront to my conscious life.

And I could think about things in my conscious life, but I made IT brought them close in a way that I could get closer and closer to the flame, and then gained some understanding. I've still amazed at how answers arrive, both during the session and in the weeks and months that follow. If one puts the attention to IT, I think that's why it's important.

Have a guide of some order to have some some soda structure because otherwise you can one can get attach to the sounds in the room and just and there's probably meaning there, but I wanted to do some deeper work. I have not had experience with solicited, and at least not since my youth. And I don't recommend Young people do.

I regret doing elliston solicited. And as a Young person, I don't say that for politically correct reasons or liability reasons. I just think my mind was not developed and but i'm intrigued by something. So here's the question.

How is that that solicited on in particular, and hydrolyze on and the ego dissolution that people talk about until yvan, how do you think that lined up with some of the experiences that you've been describing for a adequate meditation practice? Because that's something that I did not experience on md. ma.

In fact, if anything, I experienced for the first time what really feeling like a isolated container was in the difference, speech and how empathy and being bounded, having, in other words, good boundaries. And empathy could be sympathetic. I experiences that for the first time there.

And I I do think that there is learning inside of these states that translates into everyday life when one is not on these states. The last thing i'll say is no I don't feel the the impulse to go and do twenty more m dma sessions. I think that the three is part of this study um were very effective for me. And you know as they say, if you hear the calling again, you might do IT. But i'm very curious about suicide and in particular and this notion of ego dissolution because we've been talking about the self.

So so there are different ways in which the sense of self can be eroded or expanded or there's lot of experiences that can still have a kind of center to them but be a very novel and and transformational um and one can refine those as a kind of goal state, right?

And it's sort of there's a concept in boot sm that I think is useful IT doesn't translate well to english or you can set up kind of false associations in english that that are unfortunately, but so is a concept of emptiness. Ss in buddies, which um sounds again kind of grey and dispirit in in english. But it's what. Is it's it's cogent terms are are things like unconditioned unconstrained alist right? So it's it's um there's a and and that is so what i'm talking about nondum when i'm talking about that the loss of a sense of subject and then what's left in budding sm, they would often describe as left as emptiness.

But an emptiness is not a something it's not a importantly is not the same thing as unity, right? So it's not it's not a one is right because it's it's what was that when that when the center drops out of experience, it's not like you are suddenly merged with the cup, right? It's but now granted that, you know, this is where suicide and another psychiatrically can give a false impression of of, I think, what the goal is.

You can have kind seem emerging experience. You can have unity experiences on psychodeviant xs, which can be quite powerful, especially with nature, with other people, and with nature where you can just feel like you the the energy of your body becomes incredibly vivid and powerful, is like like you're everything is just buzzing with life energy. And then when you you touch an other person's hand, or you touch a tree, there can be this, a continue of energy, which can be this overwhelming experience of a, and again, this is A A A, just a twenty Megan change in the contents of conscious ness.

right? This, like this is non ordinary state of conscious ness, but like this is so give some indication of what of how this happens. When I back in the day, when I was in my twenty years and I was experimenting with with this was L D.

But some friends and I I decided we had this brilliant idea. We would camp above mere r woods and then take some some ellsey dawn and then walk down like a mile. I think the camps out into the into the actual proper growth of trees and and commune with a giant red woods, the taller trees on earth.

Um and so we drop the asset at done and we start walking, but the asset came on almost immediately and we didn't get we got nowhere near the woods and we ve got stopped by a tree that was just like a an ordinary twenty foot oak tree, like the most boring tree in the world and that tree absorb like the next next six hours of our concious tension because I was the tree of life, I been a Better tree. Um so this we're talking about non ordinary days of conscious ness where in an emerging with life and with with the world is possible and that is a so i'm not i'm not saying that kind of experience isn't possible, but there's a sort of uh expanded self reunification IT IT is a kind of ego dissolution. But there is there is a kind of equity that sort of goes along for the ride as well or can go along for the ride.

And the real insight in damping ss, the real sort of center less center of the buzzi, is a recognition that that in some ways equalizes all experiences and it's it's it's just as available now in the this ordinary you know podcasting experience as IT is when your margin hands on with a an occurred and you know on four hundred micrograms of basic and this this is the whole universe um and and so it's it's it's the it's the equality of those two experiences that that that this this concept of emptiness captures which a concept of oneness doesn't quite capture as one this is really this this peak experience of being dragged out of your you know you are something this into a much bigger something, right emptiness is just no center, right, and then everything is is in its own place, right? There are still sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts and feelings, but there's just there's no there's no center and there's no clinging to anything. There's no cleaning to identity.

There's no clean to the good stuff. There's no there's no resistance to the bad stuff. There's no so pleasant and unpleasant gets strAngely equalized and there's this is very expensive and and most importantly, IT doesn't block anything. So yeah if for whatever reason, if your nervous system is set up to have the oh my god, i'm now merging with the tree experience that's that's possible from the state of no center right and and and not my you know that not a reason for three years ago right before code. But my last you know big psychiatry experience there was I was very much experiencing that where as you, so far as I at the peak, there was no me to remember any of any of this stuff.

But know, and so far as I could experiment with, is this really different from anything else? You know, there is a kind of equalizing to the the emptiness recognition even in the in the presence of a completely transformed neurophysiology. And and so that again, there's there's a point of contact. And the real point of contact between psychic alex s and meditation for me is but for my experiences on psychodeviant s that I don't think there's just no way I would have had the free attention to be interested in in in the project at all. Um and there are other aspects of the project is not just having this insight into sells ness, it's all of the ethical ramifications of that.

So what kind of person do you want to be? What are your values? What's what is a good life altogether when you are talking about relationships and in a political engagement? And the changes you can make in the world or not make or is just what kind of person do you want to be there?

There's there's a much larger consideration and and as you discovered you know experience on M D M A, can um really you both both expand your model of what is possible and what is desirable, what is Normative and just what what kind of self do you want to be in the world? Um and uh I can also help you cut through things that are inhibiting you. You're specializing any of these possibilities. Es, in ordinary waking consciousness .

ve certainly found that to be the case, I am erased a really important point, which is that once these learnings take place, these understand take place inside of psychiatry journeys. And I do believe they translate to a plasticity. I do want highlight the point for people of times.

People say, you know this, uh mushroom or this uh psychiatric um IT opens plasticity. But of course, plasticity has to be directed some place. Plastic is just a process like walking or anything else underlying neural process.

And I I think it's impossible for me to understand what compartments of my life have been impacted by these rm dma sessions. But I in some ways, I wonder whether not not just the transition away from animal research, but also a deeper realization of the love for learning and sharing information. You won't goes so far to say this podcasts is happening because of that particular session. But these things they play out into multiple domains of the self.

And I do think that um the key features that feel most important to me to mention are that um he really identified a true loves, things that I truly love and made me less, less cautious about feeling how intense those loves really are and then also lower the innovation point of expLoring like what what would that mean, right? And one of the rings that bring this up and why I think it's so important that you mention issues around politics and ethics and many things have splayed out from your exploration, psychotic meditation, neuroscience, philosophy. You know, all the things that are you.

And of course, that is only a subset, is that so much of what I hear and see, so much of what I hear and see in the kind of self help space contradicts itself and leads back to the the origin without a lot of progress. And for instance, we hear, you know, absence makes the heart road under, but then out of side mind, you hear about radical acceptance. But then what if it's radical acceptance of non acceptance, right? I mean, there are some experiences in people for which I radically accept the fact I want nothing to do with them.

Yeah and is that in I supposed to train? And that so these are the questions, I think, that keep a lot of people from expLoring things like meditation because they feel like, well, is the idea to just be OK with everything is radical exceptions, just like what just know bodow me with with things, even if they my goal is to somehow surpassed the idea that they're harmful. And I don't think that's actually the way any of this stuff is posed to work, although I don't clam to be the authority on IT either.

You know, I think notions of radical acceptance and radical honesty and and any number of different says that one can find out there are really the the most silent begins and guides that most people have in order to try and navigate tough areas in their life, including the relationship to self, but others and political orientations. And so I feel like almost all those things can be used to anchor down in a stance that mayor may not be informed or to open up to ideas. And so I think that none of this can really be solved in a single practice. That sounds like, but IT does seem to me, based on what you've told us today, is that only throw A A deep understanding of the self as IT really is, as opposed to this illusion that you framed up. Could we actually arrive at some answers about like what's actually right for each and every one of us?

Yeah I mean that there's one generic answer that I think can be extracted both from the psychic chod alex and from meditation and just from thinking more clearly about the nature of of our lives. And it's it's to become more process oriented and to and to continue be more more sensitive to the the the merage like character of of achieving our goals right now. I'm not i'm not against the cheeping goals.

I have a lot of goals and you are very busy and lots of things I want to get done and know I am satisfied as anyone to finish a project. And but if you look at the time course of all of that fulfilment and you you just the few lessons everyone I think has to draw, one is most of your life is spent in the process, right? Like they got like the moment at which the goal is you fully conquered.

That is just, I mean, that has a you is a tiny duration. And if IT is a very short half life and your is in the moment you you arrive at IT, IT begins to recede because in the meantime, we have all these other goals that have appeared on horizon. You've got people asking what you're going to do next.

And you in some sense, if you if you're focus on goals, you really you can never arrive, right? And I think what we're what we're looking, we're all looking for in life, you know whether we're ever thinking about taking psychiatrically or. Or practicing something like meditation. We're looking for good enough reasons to let our attention fully rest in the present right now like a that that is the logic of success like that.

The the sense like i've got all these things I want to do, if I could just get rich enough for, fit enough for daland my sleep, well enough for you, improve my life in all this was get the right relationship, wouldn't be great to be married, you know, I want to start a family. I want all of these, these things. Why do I want these things? I want these things because i'm telling myself this is it's not that all of those things are wonderful, right? I'm not i'm not discounting those relative forms of happiness, resources of happiness because it's all completely valid to is is completely valid to want those things.

But in the press is one thing is absolutely clear. It's possible to be miserable in the presence of all of those things, right? And you can add, you can add great wealth and fame and everything on top of that. T is possible.

Be absolutely miserable having everything anyone could seemingly want, right? And just have open a newspaper to see people living out that predicament, right? Spectacularly wealthy, famous, healthy, successful people who could do anything they want in there in life, apparently. And yet they're doing this thing completely diffunce tional. And making them need to be miserable.

I want name named some people .

come to mind at the moment. Um so so there is a there is A A clear association between having everything and happiness. This possible and is also possible to have very little you know and almost nothing and to be quite happy.

And you might not have met these people, but, you know, I have met people who have spent, know, ten years alone in a cave, right? They come out of that cave, not flatly neurotics or psychotic. They come out of that k, beaming with compassion and joy and i'm it's like they've been taking m dma for ten years essentially and they come out the gave now there are you going to talk about IT, right?

Um so and i'm not necessarily recommending that project anyone of i'm just saying that, that is a psychological possibility. So you have a double association here with the you can have everything and be miserable. You can have nothing and be iming with with happiness um so what is that that we actually want in all of our seeking to arrange the props in our lives and our and our and the story have a convincing enough story to tell about ourselves.

We are doing the right thing ah what what is all of that effort predicated on is predicated on this desire and this expectation that if we could get all of this stuff in the right place and not have anything terrifying to worry about, right? Everyone we love is healthy for the moment, right? And we're healthy.

And that you we've got something to look for d to on the weekend. And there's not some there's not a plumbing league in the house that we have to immediately respond to. And we like our house and our career is going fine.

And there's something good to watch on netflix. And we have all of IT right now. Can we just actually give up the war, right?

Can we can we can we fully locate our our sense of well being in the present is that can we relax the impulse to brut about the past, or think anxiously about the future for long enough to discover that all of this here is enough, right? Because our life, our wife, is, we have this finite resource of you. We absolutely have the finite resource of time.

But within this, the the finite resource, the continuum of time, we have the even more precious resource of free attention, that is that that can find are, are, are, are fulfillment in the present right? And because even if, even if for guarding our time to do the things that are most important to us, we can spend all of that time you're regret in the past, or you know, anxiously expect in the future. And telling IT IT just bounced ing between past and future in our thinking about ourselves and our lives and basically just dancing over the present and never making contact with the right.

So what we I I think what we want is, is a circumstance where attention can be located in the present in a way that's truly fulfilling. And unless you have had some kind of radical insight that allows you to do that on demand, you are, in some sense, hostage to the circumstances of your life to do do that for you. You're you're constantly trying to engineer a state of the world that will propagate back on a state of self that will make the the present moment good enough.

And what meditation does, and psychiatric to some degree does this, but meditation very directly does this. IT reverses the causes and and lets you actually changed, change states such that you can be fulfilled before anything happens, right? Nothing, your happiness is no longer predicated on the next good thing happening.

You can be in the presence of the next good or bad thing, already been fulfilled and already been a peace. You know me, they say, I think they're misleading nouns. Can we can throw IT at what is left there? But IT is, you know, tranquility, this freedom, lack of contraction, lack of conflict, like all of that is that I can be more and more of a default.

And all of that is also compatible with deciding, you know, yeah, why not get in shape, why not engage this project? Why not you change your career? Mean, it's not it's not that you need to be somebody who who except to to your point, you can notice all of these non optimal things because no matter how much you meditate, you know you you're very, very likely going to spend a lot of your time still last and thought, still identified with IT and still wanting, still caring about the difference between this function and and Norma tivo in your life, right? And is because the question is what you what can you locate when the point is really like, how much can you puncture that seeking happiness project with the recognition that you're already free, right? That that's what that's what meditation makes possible.

You can keep just a thousand times a day letting some daylight into this search space. And and so but IT is still compatible. Like you can mean working out as a great frame and wish to look at this because in working out when you you when you really work out, you i'm thinking mostly is really is anything but is in a resistance training or cardio or something like you get to you're intentionally putting yourself in classically unpleasant circumstances physiologically. And if if you were, imagine what is like to do anything to failure, right? If you just check and what that is like at at the level of sensation.

I mean, that is is basically a made IT feels like a medical emergency, right? I'm like that if you were having that experience for some other reason, I if you woke up in middle night and felt what IT feels like to be dead lifting, you know on your tenth rap on a set where you're going to, you would fail eleven, right? Like that is just, you know, that's an emergency, but because you understand what you're doing in the gym and you've saw IT out and is actually is actually something you like doing, right? And you can even get of a real dobin, you know ahead from from doing IT um that what what you're doing when you're doing that is your own in kind of a like you're actually um transforming A A classical negative experience into something that almost intrinsically positive, right? Certainly the net on IT is positive.

Um you can do that and being able to do that is more and more the experience of being actually at peace even while exerting really intense effort in in one direction. So you can be strain and i'm sure of physiologically showing a lot of stress. I am sure that you course all is up and like you blood pressures up, heart rate is certainly up.

Um so it's like far as the body is concerned is a stress as AR as the I can see. But you really can be deeply economist and at peace because again, because of the frame around IT, because of the concept attach to IT, because you know what you're doing, you know why it's happening and you want IT um you so that that that's an attitude you can bring into other stressful things that take effort to accomplish. So it's not it's not that you just need to be a push over when you learn how to meditator when you take mb ma or you do any work on yourself in any of these ways. But um well, I think you I think you want to find as you want to find your point of rest in the midst of of any struggle .

would say that they certainly M D M A but and again, I have less experience with meditation and but they really, I think put us ultimately in positions of what only refer to as real strength. This can make what before seemed like impossible decisions, or even concepts or emotional states, to even think about for any period of time without deliberately distracting or avoiding in some other way, and be able to lean into those with with open eyes.

And I think that's to me, that's my definition, strength. I don't know what other people consider, but there there's definitely something real. They are in each case. This may seem like a divergence, but I and many other people are very curious about a recent decision that you made, which was to close your account on twitter. Used to eleven instagram c out I noticed .

I never I mean that my team manages that.

I've i've never I love him over IT.

I've been I never in that.

So h it's pretty good actually imagine what would have done good job with that. Um but your decision to close your account on twitter um I think grabs a lot of eyes and years and there's a lot of questions about why IT was a very large account you know IT correlated with a number of things is that for the outsider people might be wondering about you know new leadership, new you know people who had been booted off, brought back on or at least invited back on, right and so on. You are certainly not obligated to explain your behavior to me or anybody else for that matter. But i'm curious if you might share with us what the motivation was um for taking the account down and and how you feel in the absence of I mean your thumbs presumed ly are or freed up to do other things.

I was getting like an our theory right thing.

And if you don't and share, I think there there's a lot of curiosity about you and your your routines. You have been very generous and sharing that your knowledge and but also and like what what makes what makes you take, what motivates pretty big decisions like that. IT wasn't a major platform for you.

right? Yeah, yes, I was. I was the only social media platform i've ever engaged. Like you said, we have an instagram. I have a facebook account. But I never, never use those as platforms, never on them and never, never follow people. And i've never in all the posting has just come from it's just market and you know from my team um but twitter was me and you know for Better worse and um I began to feel more and more for worse. And IT was IT was interesting because IT was very talked about a lot of my podcast about just my my hate relationship with twitter over the years. Many good things came to me from twitter and and I was I was following a lot of smart people and IT become my news feed and my first point of contact with with information each day and I was really attached to a just for that reason just as a consumer of of content um and then I was also a place where I was I genuinely wanted to communicate with people and react to things and I would see some article that I thought was great and I would signal boost IT to my the people following me on twitter and that was rewarding and I was literally help people on twitter like, I mean, there was there were, you know, the people who i've raised lots of money for on twitter, just by signal boost in there, go find me and and so I was engaged in a way that seemed productive.

But I was always worried that I was producing needless elect for me and was was giving me a signal in my life that I was being lord to respond to and taken seriously that was out of proportion to its its representation of any opinion or set of opinions that I I should be taken seriously so I was noticing that that um and again this evolved over years and this long before a long, long long predated recent changes to to twitter um but I was noticed that many of the worst things that had happened for me professionally were first born on twitter and just like know some some I got into with somebody or something that I fact like I needed to podcast about in response to an twitter um it's so much of IT either either is genesis was twitter or is the the uh the further spin of IT that became truly unpleasant and dsf unctions happened on twitter like I was just twitter was part of the story when I was got really bad and I i've had, you know vacation ions that have gone side ways just because I got on twitter and said something. Then I had to produce the controversy that I had to respond to and then I had to do a pg cast about that and but, and just, and IT was just, okay, this is a mess, right? And so at that point, you know, I, you know have friends who know also had big twitter platforms.

Who would, who would say, you know, why are you know, why are you responded anything on twitter? Just tweet and ghost just do you like to rock down and try try to get you know give me talking to as to build more um and both of them engage twitter in that way. And they I think they basically never look at their at mangers.

They never see what's coming back at them. They just they use IT effectively the way I use or don't even use instagram or facebook. I don't even can see what's going out there in my name.

And so I could essentially do that for myself on twitter, presumably. And I did that for some periods of time, but then I would continually decide, okay, now it's all balancing. Maybe I can just communicate you because I was very tempting for me to communicate with people, because I would see somebody clearly misunderstanding something I had set on my podcast.

And I think like why I clarify this misunderstanding, right? And and my efforts to do that almost variably produced a this is sometimes that was a kind of Mandarin, a process of of discovery. But often IT was just kind of a stark confrontation with what appeared to me to be just luna acy and malevolence on a scale that I never encounter elsewhere in my life like I never meet these people in life, right um and yet I was million these people by the tens of thousands on twitter.

And so the the thing that began to worry me about IT, and again, I understand that people have the opposite experience on depending on what you're putting out and what you you know, the kinds topics you're touching, you could have just nothing but love coming back at you on twitter or write. But because I am very essentially in the center politically because I this is now on my podcast, this is not in the waking up. I'm often criticize in the far left and criticized in the far right.

I'm basically pissing off everyone some of the time, right? And it's very different. If you're only criticized in the left, you hate no debt, you get hate from the left, but you have all the people on the right who just reflexively and tribally expressing their solidarity for you, right? And who are who are dancing on your enemies for you and you when your enemies come out of the would work.

And if you're only criticizing the right, i'm sure you get a lot of pain from the right. But you've got the people on the left. You are tribally identified with the left who are just going to reflexively defend you.

If you're in the center criticizing the left as hard as anyone on the right ever criticize the criticized the left, and you're also criticizing the right as hard as anyone on the left criticises the right, you're getting hate from both sides all the time and no one is reflected, flexible and tribally defending you because you pissed them off of last. You like you might be getting in hate from the left now. And the people on the right agree with you, but they can't forget the thing you said about trump on that podcast you you know two podcast ago.

So they're not going to defend you. And so what I basically created hell for myself on twitter because I was, I just know IT was just a theater of IT, just pure coffee most of the time. And what I was seen was I am, there's no way there, this many psychopath in the world, I, but I was seen psychopath everywhere. I was seen the most malicious dishonesty and uh, you know, just goal post moving and hypocras y and and is just, I mean, some of its trolling and some of its real confusion and some of that is psychopathy but it's like IT was so dark that um I worried that he was actually giving me A A very negative and sticky view of humanity that was I mean when I was you know why I think IT isn't an inaccurate but too I I I was I was something I was returning to so much because I think I was checking twitter know at leased a dozen times a day and i'm sure there were some days when I checked at one hundred times a day and IT IT was again IT was my main source of information as constantly reading articles and and then putting my own stuff out um that he became this kind of fun house mirror in which I was looking at the the most grow task side of humanity and feeling you know implicated in in ways that were more important because IT was just IT was reputational important or seemed to be important um I know a lot of these people is not this weren't just faceless troll these these are people with whom I have had relationships and in some cases, friendships who because of what you largely trump and covet did to our political landscape in the last half a thousand years um we're ginning to act in ways that that seems starkly dishonest and and you know crazy making to me so I was just noticed that I was forming of a view of people who I actually had dinner with that was way more negative based on their twitter behavior than I think would ever be justified by any way they would behave in life with me. I mean, that's like never, I was never gonna a face to face encounter when any of these people that was this malicious and dishonest and gas lighting and weird, right, as as was what was happening hourly on twitter, right?

And so I just began to become more sensitive to what this was, you know, just the residue of all this in my life, and how, and just how often the worst thing that the worst thing about me in my relationship with the people in my life, you know, they just talking to my wife or my kids, was just the fact that I had been on twitter at some point in the previously, in the previous hour and there were some residue of that you know, if you in my interaction with them, like know what do you stressed out about, what do you annoy about, what are you pissed off about, you know what can you get out of your head um what is the thing that you now feel like you need to spend the next week of your life focused on because IT went so sideways for you all of that twitter you know I literally a hundred percent of that was twitter and and so um I just at one point, I I was actually thanksgiving day. I just looked at this. I just I mean was very little thought went into IT I mean literally I mean no.

IT was more thought in involved than you you know whether I want a coffee when you ask me. When I showed up here, I was just like certain point I I just saw and I just I just rip the band at all and yeah so um and to answer your other question is been almost holy positive as you might expect given the the lighting of of a pain and discomfort I just ran through. But um it's also it's surprising to recognize how much of a presence IT wasn't my life given the sense of what is now missing.

I mean, like there's IT was there's no question there was there's kind of an addictive component to IT. And when you see and like when I look at what ell's doing on twitter, forget about his ownership of IT and i'm not you I have got a lot to say about you know the choices he's making uh for the platform but just his personal use of IT is just so obviously an expression of you I don't know addiction is the clinically appropriate um term but you know his dsf unctions attachment to tweet to using the platform. Forget again forget forget about changing IT and only IT but just the just the degree to which IT is pointless lesly disrupt in the life of one of the most productive people in any generation.

Um I that was also instructive to make I because I know you, I just you know um his. From of a friend's I view of the situation is so obviously not good for him that he spending this much time on twitter um that I just brought that back to me but not if if this is what is doing elan and he's got all these other things he could be doing with his attention how much of my use of twitter is actually you know a good idea and you know optimize to my well being and the well being and the people around me um so anyway, IT was there was an addictive component to IT, I think. And so when I got stripped off, I know I do notice that there is mean, there's there times I pick up my phone and I realized this is like the old me picking up my phone for for a reason that no longer exists because is not that much, you know, and I have a slack channel with my team and I ve got obviously, but like that is not much of what I was doing with my phone really in the end.

And so like it's just my phone as much less of a presence in my life. And and so it's it's almost wholly good. But um yeah you know there's I think there is some danger in uh or some some possible danger in losing touch with certain aspects of culture, which again, i'm not even sure. I mean, there's this question of you know how much is twitter real life and how much is just a mass illusion? H I don't know, but in so far as IT actually matters what happens on twitter um or and so far as I was actually getting a news diet, which i'm not going to be able to recapitulate for myself or i'm just not in fact I want to recapitalize yg even if I could um if any of that matters I haven't discovered that yet but yeah I mean there's IT was taking up an immense them out of band with and it's it's impressive I think I said, you know like I amputated A A phantom limb, right?

I like IT was not a real limb, but IT was IT was a this continuous presence in my life that that is weird that is actually relates to the concept of self in surprising ways because I I felt there was a part of myself that existed on twitter, and I know I just performed a suicide of that self rather like that. This is ending right now and there is no redo. There's nothing go back and check. There's just it's gone and I didn't even I didn't go back and look at my like what's interesting to consider that know i'd been on twitter for twelve years. I don't keep a journal.

I mean, twitter in my time, mine would have been a kind of journal I could have gone back to a specific hour in a specific day and looked at what I was paying attention to him and that could have been an interesting record of just who i've been for a decade, probably a pretty humble in record of who i've been for a decade um in terms of the kind of things are captivated my attention but I didn't even if I didn't even think to go nostalgically just look at any of that or see if any of IT was worth saving or archiving or think you I just just delete you know and IT was um uh and so my my actual sense of who I am in my engagement with with my audience, my you, the the world of people who could potentially know me, like what does that mean to be to have a platform? You know, where do I exist digitally? My sense of of all of that got trunked in a, in a way that.

As much as noisy. I mean, it's amazing how much can't get fucked up now in my life like it's like with twitter, almost anything could happen, right? Like like the next tweet was always an opportunity to massively complicate my life. There is no one now like a space for me now and you what i'm going to stay in your podcast, what i'm going to stand my own podcast, what i'm going to right next that's much more um you know deliberative and the opportunities to take my foot out of my mouth or to reconsider all you know whether anything any of this is worth that is is worth is this the hill I really wanted die on now um is much more um can be much more considered and I mean I think all of that to the good but even more important than that is there's not i'm not getting this continuous signal that is always inviting a response, whether on twitter, on my own poster anywhere else um and it's just much as noisy and my life as much as noisy and and clutch and that that is definite feels Better, just one hundred .

percent Better. I'm happy to hear that I know a number of people miss you there, but you sound happy. I sense the genuine happiness in the several things come to mind.

First of all, thank you for sharing your your rational there and how IT went. I think for law, I think you must have like walked around in circles for hours talking about him. There is delete as many good decisions are executed, right?

Yeah you know, i'm a big fan of cal newport. Ts work deep work in many ways calls. I've never met him but we know other through the the internet space um really head of his time with this notion of deep work and limiting distractions. I think he's even got a book about a world without .

email or really treme so we deserve some credit he had been somewhat approximate cost this he'd been on my podcast and he had encouraged me to delete to twitter because I had been I had been sort of in reaching some kind of you know crisis point with the a prior to that podcast.

And so we've talked about IT and I I had recorded that podcast sts, but had released that actually recorded the podcast the day before I want to delete twitter, but hadn't IT released IT, my podcast with him in the intro to IT. I I then give a post mortal on my deleting IT, but he was, he was one of the last people who was in my head around these issues. And I had to you, that was not by accident. I had invited among the podcast because I increasingly wanted to think about, you know, whether this was totally dsf unctions.

Well, i'm a big fan of how networks and I I am on social media, on twitter. I had some you know, high friction interactions there and have a process for dealing with those tend to avoid high friction confrontations online. But in gram is a much friendly, replaced, by the way, if you want to come over to where like the nice kids, like the cool kids.

actually hang out, not looking .

for a substitute, okay, you know, I didn't. I don't let me enter you over there. You do. But I think that this notion of really being able to access with cocos deep work, what um rick ruin talks about, you know being able to touch the source of creativity and focused on on a regular base does require that one have certain types of and in some cases zero interaction with certain platforms that merely being on a platter, forman blocking people that would just won't provide I think a lot of energy opens up and i'm fascinated this concept of energy, and we only have so much energy, neural energy to devote. And in many ways, what you described, there's really, I think, striking parallel ls to what talking about along these last hours, which is that sometimes the thing that feels so, so powerful, that has such a gravitation pool, and that we think this is experience, this is life, this is just the way that is actually is an illusion. And when you step away from IT, you realized that there's this whole other dimension of interactions that, that was available all along, but that we, for whatever reason, we're intervening in by way of our reflective, distracted behavior.

So I think is yeah I I got religion on this point. It's a good change.

So I want to say a couple of things. First of all. Every time you tell I learned so much and that you know in the dimensions of neuroscience and hard court neutral circuitry type stuff which know my home when you talk about philosophy or or meditation or psychiatrically and even in politics on a topic that i'm, you know, wolf link under educated in, but you have this amazing ability to blend and and synergies across things.

And I think today, what ocs to me is that not only is that no accident because of you're training and you're the rigor and the depth that which you've explore these different topics, but also your openness to IT. But I think at least for me above all, because I think you are able doing capsule ate the idea of the self and and the different ways in which we, each and all can potentially interact with the environment and our new landscape. Um your description of meditation have to says now has forever changed the way I think about meditation.

I would no longer just think of is a perceptual exercise. I on the podcast i've been talking about IT as something to to do for these various benefits, the benefits set of more focus on stress at other of which certainly exist. But what you described today has a has such an a lure in in a hold, such a promise that, as I mentioned, i'm certainly going to change my behavior.

And I know i'm speaking on behalf of many, many people. I just want to extend my thanks for your coming here today to teach us even more because of course, you have your podcast and the APP and the waking up APP and the fact that regardless of the political landscapes, regardless of the one neo science feels about psychiatric, there are the where things are. At any point time, you strike me somebody who is very committed to sharing knowledge and thoughtful, deep course so that people can benefit.

And there are very few people like you. In fact, there's probably only just one. And so I feel very grateful to be sitting across the table from him for these last hours.

Nice why I really enjoy this and want to congratulate you on what you built here because your podcast is is everywhere. I just you know i'm a fan and uh even more than that, i'm continually seeing the evidence of you reaching people and and benefiting people and just is really, really like this is the one of the best examples of, you know new media just carving out of space that that people didn't really know exist IT know like this is not television, is not radio, is not in and all of some people have time to hear a conversation of great length that goes into, you know need a great scientific detail on you don't hormones I mean, like who would have thought that was even possible? And so um yeah I really congratulations is fantastic and i'm just very happy for the opportunity to talk to you and and your people.

Thank you. It's very great to find here and I feel very blessed in no small part because our conversation today thank you .

so much to be continued.

to be continued. We do IT again, again and again and again. Thank you for joining me today for my discussion with doctor sam Harris.

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