Sam Harris: A Rational Mystics Guide To Consciousness & Awakening | Know Thyself Podcast EP 47

is just a fact about us that we're thinking basically every moment of the day we're having a conversation with ourselves we're remembering the past we're anticipating the future we're subtly failing to make actual contact with the present moment if you're angry for 10 hours there's a lot you can do in 10 hours to derange your life and your relationships I've always thought it's so interesting that we can spend a lifetime suffering something that is essentially a non-event you know you're making a cup of tea and you're thinking about a meeting that you're going to have in five days and you're getting anxious meditation is the remedy for that and once you can practice mindfulness from negative states of mind like fear and anger begin to function like mindfulness alarms you know the truth is breaking the spell doesn't even require the contents of Consciousness to change what do you feel as a likelihood that we will engineer Consciousness into super intelligent AGI yeah and that's a difficult question to resolve [Music] hello beautiful beings welcome back to the know they self podcast where every single week we get the honor and privilege to sit down with a brilliant mind an open heart to see how we can learn more about the true nature of self and the world around us at deeper and deeper levels my guest today is the creator of the waking up app he is a best-selling author a philosopher a neuroscientist and host of The Making Sense podcast he really needs no introduction but I will say that his life his message the work that he does in the world has been profoundly influential for me over the years in my development and study about a lot of things I want to be diving into today it's not just the topics of life that he's so emphatically interested in that I also share deep passions for and that hold that I hold close to my heart but the way in which he engages in exploring such topics like Consciousness free will the nature of self um who and what we are and it's been such a pleasure to be able to recently connect with him and I've been looking forward to this for for quite some time so the goal with my conversation and starting the the framework for this conversation today is to really demystify what it means to awaken and to go on the Journey of tangibly exploring what that what that really means and and much much more so without further Ado let's welcome to the know they self podcast the rational Mystic himself Dr Sam Harris I aspire to be that nice yeah cool well great to meet you again and happy to be here my pleasure my honor been looking forward to this like I said for for a while and uh let's just Dive Right In you know this being the know thyself show I figured no better place to start than the self and something that we both share a lot of deep personal uh passions for inquiring within experientially but then also intellectually and I would love for you to open and share your thoughts on what do you feel like most people mean when they refer to themselves as a self and how the process of suffering and imagined self essentially unfolds yeah yeah uh good question well uh I don't know that I have anything like a final answer on that topic but I I think uh there's a few things I believe that are that I believe pretty firmly here one is that the conventional sense of self that people are walking around with is an illusion which can be discovered to be such right so you can you can inspect it to the point where you no longer feel that way in the same sense and it's not to say that you would never use the word self again or the that you know you find yourself uh to be the same as other people or you just you can't differentiate yourself from the world or I mean there's there there are things that don't happen but it's important to just say at the outset that there's this is worth looking into because psychologically it's incredibly helpful and I think ultimately ethically it's incredibly helpful to come down to some understanding that what you take yourself to be subjectively moment to moment matters and can be the the linchpin of of really all of your unnecessary suffering right so you um it's worth looking into so that the feeling of self that I think most people are walking around with by default is the sense that there's a subject interior to the body that is the Thinker and doer and a true agent of conscious life so it's it's not that people feel identical to their bodies they feel almost like passengers in their bodies they feel like they have bodies um now you know I think there's a lot of rational people who don't believe that to be true if you tell if you if you tell a scientist that he doesn't feel identical to his body um he might object because he knows himself to be you know conceptually identical to his body he knows that there's if he doesn't believe in an immortal soul that can be separated from the body well then he believes that he's identical to his brain and the the totality of what it's doing neurologically in his body but as a matter of experience nevertheless most people whatever they believe they feel that they're not quite identical to their whole body they don't they have hands they can imagine being without hands they uh and that that sense of dualism extends really to everything they can notice about their their physical bodies um and I think you know most people would imagine that you know even if they're materialists the what they are as conscious agents is a matter of what the brain is doing and if you could you know have a brain transplant you would expect to go with the brain and not remain with the body right so if you took my brain and put it in another body I would expect to move over there um you know at minimum people feel like they are their brains but they experience doesn't give us any evidence of even having Brands right much less that the brain is is is relevant to to the nature of Consciousness or the nature of what our minds are doing so um you uh it's worth differentiating what people conceptually know about the biology and and you know the and the mind's dependency on the brain and what they feel subjectively and and just phenomenologically how they they move through life and there I think virtually everyone feels like they are a thinker of thoughts a an experiencer of experience a subject very likely in the head behind their eyes looking out at a world that is not them that is separate from what they are as conscious agents and in some sense that World includes the body and the body can malfunction you've got a pain in your knee and you feel as the subject not identical to that pain but in relation to it and you're resisting it from a point outside the pain you are receiving the pain as a as a kind of locus of conscious Consciousness you can pay attention to it you can try to be distracted from it uh and then you could the pain can draw you back and yet you are up here somehow as a subject and if you do a practice like meditation or something like mindfulness and you inspect that feeling of dualism where there's a sense of a subject that can pay attention to experience and then get distracted by thought and then come back and pay attention to experience that sense that there's a place from which you can focus and then be that's the meditator that's you know you now trying to meditate uh that dualism gets maintained Even in our spiritual efforts to recognize something about the illuseriness of the self I mean there are many people who are practicing meditation even quite diligently and even going on Retreats you know silent Retreats for 10 days at a stretch or more um and yet still they feel like they are the The Observer of experience now they're the one being mindful or struggling to be mindful they're the one who gets concentrated on the breath or on a mantra or it can be any practice really um and yet there's still this dualism of the there's the Consciousness feels like it's a a kind of Spotlight of attention that you can aim from a place in the head at experience and ultimately that's an illusion ultimately there if if you pay close enough attention you recognize that there's only experience as a matter of of of subjectivity right now I'm not making any claims about how Consciousness relates to the universe or you know that it was here before the Big Bang or that there's no physical world we can leave all that aside for the moment I'm happy happy to talk about that but I'm just talking about what what ex what is available to experience if you're really paying attention if you really notice what is happening moment to moment and The crucial difference between dualism and not and ultimately suffering and not is at bottom identification with the stream of thought that's arising in Consciousness so it just it's just a fact about us that we're thinking basically every moment of the day we're having a conversation with ourselves where we're remembering the past we're anticipating the future we're subtly fail you know subtly or grossly failing to make actual contact with the present moment because everything is being conceptualized and rehearsed and reiterated and reacted to judged Etc um and it's through this sort of scrim of of thought that everything is perceived and and even one's initial efforts to to meditate and break through to something non-conceptual gets kind of bent and conformed to this pattern of thinking now you're thinking that you're being mindful now you're thinking oh I now I need to pay closer attention to the breath and oh why did I get distracted and and but that sense of of self that seems to seems to persist even as you notice thoughts arise and then you come back to the object of meditation and you notice thoughts that there's still this undercurrent of thinking that's not being fully inspected and fully released and so ultimately it was a very long-winded way of answering your question ultimately this sense of self that I think most people are experiencing moment to moment and that is really the the string upon which all of their states of psychological suffering is is are strong is um identification with thought with conceptual thought and that identification with conceptual thought is very analogous to like being in a dream of sorts right and I've always found it so interesting that we and many people spend can spend a lifetime suffering something that is essentially a non-event that if they did the proper practices and had the understanding um that they could actually create space from their own thought and emotion to experience self in a more vast context would be so much more freeing so much more liberating and so could you share your thoughts on how thought in general um and the close identification with thought is very is very much like being asleep and what it means to essentially become awake from the Slumber hmm yeah it's a good analogy and it really is more than an analogy neurologically I think we when we're thinking uh we are doing something quite similar to to what we're doing When We're Dreaming I mean when you're asleep and dreaming your thinking is no longer constrained by your sensory experience right you're no longer perceiving the world and interacting with the world and so it's no longer it's no longer getting trimmed down and interrupted punctuated by by the you know your your Pursuit your perceptual apparatus all the when you're dreaming it's just it's all thought right so you get fully captured by it um but it's it's still very much the same process and uh so it is a kind of hallucination it's a kind of you know just as when you're asleep and dreaming unless you're having a lucid dream you're not aware that you're a sleeping dream and your mind just seamlessly transitions into this new condition and you don't even remember enough about your life to to be to be surprised right you go to sleep and then all of a sudden you're you know arguing with a friend you haven't seen in 10 years right in a restaurant you've never been to and you know the you you are so unaware of the reality of your life that you're not you don't even think to be surprised by this transition I mean literally a moment ago you were asleep and you're you know safely in your bed and now you're in some new circums impossible circumstance rather often and sometimes it's a total emergency and yet you are so fully identified with being the dreamer of the dream that you don't you don't even register surprise the most surprising thing about ordinary dreams is that we're not surprised when they appear because we use it's a complete failure of reality testing that is there's something very similar happening every moment of the day when we're thinking and we're unaware that we're thinking I mean you're just you know you're making a cup of tea and you're thinking about a meeting that you're you're going to have in five days and you're getting anxious right that is a kind it's a miniature psychosis right it's it's completely crazy to have to be unaware of this process where you begin to imagine this future circumstance which may in fact not even resemble the circumstance you're going to find yourself in in five days and it is so come and you're unaware of the this process and the the thought sneaks up on you just as a dream does and you don't register any surprise that all of a sudden you're no longer aware of even making tea you know you don't even feel your body in space you're not you barely see what your hands are doing and you're you're elsewhere talking to yourself about something and and perhaps visualizing in some circumstance and it's it's disgorging this negative emotional state which you're then now you know living the consequences of and that you're your next thought very likely is going to be oh my God why am I this sort of person how do I what you know why why am I anxious about public speaking what like I gotta you know maybe I should go to Toastmasters and you're you're thinking right and you're unaware of this conversation and it is completely trimming down your mind to conform to this you know in this case an anxious State I mean this is our this is the character of Our Lives moment to moment when we don't see a difference between being identified with thought and not and just recognizing thought as a this automaticity that that just appears in Consciousness all by itself so I mean there's there's something very similar between ordinary thinking and ordinary dreaming and there's something similar between those two states and what we recognize to be psychosis in people who are you know actually mad and you know walking the streets to talk to themselves and talking to people who aren't there and they just just living out the consequences of their Psychopathology in front of all of us The crucial difference is that they're you know they're much more you know their behavior is so unconstrained you know like like the the difference is you know we're all Talking to Ourselves but we know enough not to move our mouths right throughout throughout the day a psychotic I mean the bright line between normal Psychopathology and psychosis for many of us is just the people who can't help but you know actually verbalize what they're thinking and they they may know it's inappropriate or they may just be so caught they haven't they're they're completely unaware that anyone is listening to them but we are we have this basic psychosis already in normal Consciousness and we are talking to people who aren't there you know we're taught you're talking to you when you're when you're rehearsing the argument you just had with your mom or your wife or your you know somebody in a store and you're planning out in memory and it is kindling this negative emotion of anger or impatience or frustration or regret or whatever it is and you're not aware of all of this and you may be driving your car and you're you're having this conversation covertly in your in your head I mean it's totally normal but it's completely crazy it's just it is it is you know it's nine tenths of what a psychotic has and and yet it's normal so meditation you know by for lack of a better word is the remedy for that and that's and uh breaking that spell I mean it's not an it's not an accident that waking up is the the ancient metaphor for just you know what the process is of of breaking that spell and no longer being identified with thought yeah I'd love to keep playing on this thread here right because meditation does allow us to more quickly recognize the transitory nature of thought and be often less under the illusion of being identified as them right and so as somebody who with your waking up app now is probably sharing non-dual mindfulness with more people on the planet than anyone else you have a lot of understanding and context for how meditation and mindfulness and this process of realizing uh experientially the transitory nature of thought and how by doing that on a repeated basis you can actually start to have more of that uh lighter experience of Life throughout any time you have thought throughout the day is it extremely liberating so I would love for you to dive a little bit more uh into that and how meditation supports and alleviates the suffering well I think most people I think virtually everyone has very frequent breaks in this sense of of self and the continuity of selfhood they just don't recognize it right so it's it's meditation is the art of recognizing what is already the case and and he's just looking closely enough at the nature of experience to recognize that there you know the gap between thoughts actually reveals something right that there is there are breaks between thoughts naturally and it's even possible to recognize thought as thought just appear and disappear without ever feeling identified with it so there's a larger space in Awareness that you can drop back into and recognize that it feels a certain way it doesn't feel like a self when you're just recognizing the flow of thought as an appearance in Consciousness but you know with or without meditating I think the the sense of self is there's a discontinuity that people can notice if only retrospectively and it offers some Clues to why we find certain experiences very rewarding like like watching a film or television when you re when you're really captivated by it when you really just lose your sense that you're you know sitting in a darkened theater or sitting in front of a screen watching actors do their thing when you actually just become fully immersed in the story and you're just reacting you know you might be emotionally reacting to what's playing out on the screen but you're not you know you you are you're fully entranced one property of that experience and I think it's what you know one aspect of of what people find so rewarding is that you're you're losing your sense of self for much of that time you're just you're you're sort of Disappearing you're becoming effectively effaced you're certainly no longer self-conscious right there's no I mean the the thing that's truly rewarding about watching you know film and television is that it is a kind of super stimulus in evolutionary terms because what we're evolved to experience and to be able to navigate our you know face-to-face social encounters with other primates and we you know so we make eye contact and we and then we look away and you know we notice what people are doing with their eyes but and when two people are talking in front of us we know that at any moment one of them can turn toward us and and engage Us in the conversation or engage Us in some physical conflict we know that our reputations are always on the line we and so there's a there's a sort of a war of selves that is always happening in in physical space with other people and and that you know nothing matters more to us it just genetically than than kind of maintaining all the the Integrity of all of that um and yet what happens when we watch a film or or watch televisions that we're thrust into this completely novel social situation for which our genes have not prepared us we're we're now having face-to-face encounters and even larger than face-to-face encounters if you see in a movie theater you see you're seeing a face that's you know 10 feet tall you know the close-up has delivered us an experience of a human face that just never existed in nature unless you were you know just uh you know kissing somebody I suppose so you're you're making you you have this face-to-face encounter with other people and you might even be making eye contact with them I mean if somebody's making direct eye contact with the camera you know you're looking into another person's eyes and yet you know that you're totally unimplicated in the scene you can't be observed right you're not and therefore you can be totally unself-conscious in the presence of other people and and so it's a it's a very pristine experience of of voyeurism right you're just you are you're just looking at the lives of others up close I mean not far away not through a telescope I mean you're right there in the scene effectively and yet totally unimplicated and therefore totally free to relax and just process it and so it's it is a kind of super stimulus and but the crucial piece uh you know I think is that most people can just let their feeling of of selfhood relax in the presence of others and that tends to be the hardest place to do it in the real world in the real world you know you're sitting in a in a cafe you know drinking a cup of coffee and you're looking at you know the crowd but you know you're not making eye contact with strangers because they're all just drinking and you know reading the newspaper say and at some point you look and you see that somebody's staring at you right that change when you suddenly realize that your an object in the world for another little person uh that sudden you know contraction really where you suddenly become self-conscious in the presence of another person that is the self right I mean that is that feeling that that is a that is a ramification of what we feel all the time when we feel that we are the subject when we when we feel implicated as objects in the world and in relation to the world um and when you can drop that feeling in the presence of other people then then its absence even becomes more Salient because then because like when somebody's looking back at you the normal experience is of a feeling that you're you're being seen you're implicated by that person's gaze and it's almost like you're behind your face you're sort of wearing your face as a mask and they're looking at you right and you're you're reading you're reading the the the the faces of others to see how you're doing in some sense like like their their reaction to you is being played back on you as okay this is information that now I need to to take stock of right when you're actually free of the feeling of self you're there really is just other people in the world right like you're just it's somewhat analogous to watching a movie like you are you're you're no longer like the the theater is empty right like you're just you're you're just there's just the movie and you're just enjoying it and you can you can be it's not to say that you become an idiot and you can't figure out how to you know shakes a person's hand or walk across a room or you know figure out what you want on a menu or but you're you're no longer the center that is implicated by everything that is happening around you you're not um in some sense it's just a totality of experience and so that's some key to the the freedom that that exists there because not only are you not identified with each next thought that's telling you what a schmuck you are and how anxious you should should be but the next thing that's happening uh and how regretful you should be about the last thing that you just failed to accomplish um you're just at rest and available to notice what's happening now and so it's I mean that that is the the even if you can't even if a person hasn't experienced this yet uh they can recognize in the experiences they value in the kind of flow experiences they value whether it's you know and Performing some athletic of you know action like you know hitting a tennis ball like them at the moment when tennis really feels like it's working is a moment when you're not thinking about how to do it what you should have done the fact that you just missed it oh my God you know how much how many points have I lost in this game you're just you're at one with the action of hitting the ball and there's a kind of effortlessness to it like you you don't even know how you're doing it right like it's it's a kind of a the the mysteriousness of the whole thing is is Salient um those kinds of flow experiences are once again experiences where there's less and less of you as the experiencer and there's more and more of just the pure experience and and so that's that's what people tend to want in life and they tend to find it in a haphazard way when they're pushed into some you know extremely narrow or uh unusual event I mean it can be kind of a peak experience it could be a drug experience it could be sex it could be an emergency it could be you know watching television or watching film that becomes for whatever reason super captivating and I think that's a that's a it is you know people can disappear into their work where they're just you know the hour flies by and you were unaware of of you of what what you know it was kind of effortless um so there are glimmers of this state for people but meditation is really the only activity where you are directly targeting this Insight that the the Insight that Consciousness is this way already it's not that it's not that the the ego is really there and you successfully meditate it out of existence you you recognize that it's actually not there in the first place and and and then therefore then any experience however mundane you know even as something as boring as checking your email can be an experience in which you recognize this once you know how to meditate and it's not that sometimes in cases for example being robbed it might be useful to you identify as your body and do what's necessary in the actions that being identified as someone in a person but the for the vast majority of us and especially people that are listening to this right now we live in a society with more comfort and convenience that we ever have the suffering then mainly comes from this language that we use internally that is constantly self-referential and reinforces this construct and notion of itself and I'd love for us to just dive a little bit deeper here into how really language in in the construct of thought continues to uh reinforce this idea of self yet we're completely suffering something that if we paid close enough attention to we would see that it's not fully graspable it's something that is very much like we were speaking to earlier being in a dream hmm well I want to go back to the the example you you raise of just be of being robbed which seems like a situation where you you know much of what I just said is completely irrelevant and you you just want to be a self who can defend itself and um but when you think about that kind of experience but one is it's totally appropriate to feel adrenalized to feel fear to feel anger to feel to feel that an emergency it has to be responded to because in certain cases there is an emergency that has to be responded to but the question is how long do you want to be the in the grip of one of those emotions to in order to solve your problem right like is is the problem that you've just noticed and reacted to and contracted around best solved in a state of contraction and fear and anger and sometimes it might be I mean sometimes you know you might need just the the just pure adrenaline to solve a situation but those are super brief moments in life and you know seconds later you very likely want to be in a different state and need to be in a different state to function intelligently um because the alternative is is panic in some sense uh so it's not that I would say that the ideal is to never feel fear or anger any any con you know classically negative emotion ever again because for me they are they contain information right they they reveal it something has just happened in the world that is that you really have to pay attention to if only to just recognize that it's actually not what you thought it was and you now can you know no longer worry about it but you know if suddenly if something happens somebody you hear a window Smash and someone's climbing through it and it's you know the middle of the night okay there's something that you need to respond to but um once the once you experience that initial surge of adrenaline it's not that useful to to be lost in sort of this this catastrophic uh you know implosion of self where you're you know you're terrified you're you know uh uh Mrs you what you'd want to be I mean to take the self-defense analogies like you'd want to be somebody who has been in this situation a thousand times before can completely own it you want to be a Navy SEAL who just like this is this is my bread and butter responding to the precisely this sort of emergency right like that's the so how much fear is that guy going to be feeling in that moment so insofar as you're not that guy it's understandable that you're you're you might be super afraid but the I think everyone recognizes that the difference between being able to process you know an emergency like that in a psychologically healthy way and being traumatized by it is a difference in just how long those emotions last right and how and what you what you're able to do when you remember the experience you know a day later a year later um and so so much of you know psychological health and growth in in any kind of spiritual practice is an ability to to shorten the half-life of of these negative emotions so it's not that you never get angry again but there's an enormous difference between being angry for 10 seconds and being angry for 10 hours or 10 days or or and and then acting on the basis of that negative emotion given those those very different time windows I mean if you're angry if you're angry for 10 hours there's a lot you can do in 10 hours to derange your life and your relationships and there's a lot of dumb things you can say when talking to you know the person you're angry at or to you know between you know reacting to your colleagues at work you know from that state or getting on Twitter and and you know tweeting about it I mean that's just there's almost there's almost no telling how much damage you can do given you know given that period of time helplessly surrendered to a profoundly negative and anti-social state of mind I mean and then we see and we see that happen in people's lives um so getting better at breaking the spell earlier and earlier is um is really everything and and once you can practice your mindfulness for lack of a better word um negative states of mind like fear and anger begin to function like mindfulness alarms where it's like you you suddenly you're going along there's nothing out of the ordinary happening and then suddenly something happens and you feel lousy and say you know well you know with some form of lousy that becomes a a good to looking into the nature of Consciousness and recognizing that there's no Center to it and they then that this next thought is a mere appearance in Consciousness and so the and so rather than being taken in by this next thought of that's that's rehearsing the reasons why you should be angry or should be afraid or should be anxious you just see it as a thought and you it really is a kind of superpower you can decide at that moment is there any reason to stay angry here and if the answer is no you can actually get off the ride and and yet getting off the ride is synonymous with recognizing that there's no one there on the ride in the first place right I mean like there's it is you can sound paradoxical when I'm talking about it but there is no one who is angry there's just this appearance of of you this is there's just this change in the in the energy in the contents of Consciousness and there was this that just the physiology of anger you know the truth is breaking the spell doesn't even require the the concepts the contents of Consciousness to change like they will change if you if you actually are no longer thinking about why you should be angry but you can re the moment you recognize that there's no Center that there's no subject in the middle of the anger that there's no one who is angry you can feel that the physiology can can you know it'll take 10 seconds to dissipate right but even in that first second you can recognize that there's just Consciousness in his contents and there's no Center to it and that and so you're already free even before there's been a change in the in the in the character of experience that switch that change of perception from things that are just continually happening unfortunately and I'm the victim of it to using life and its continual opportunities to wake up and to dig deeper into the true nature of self and reality that what you spoke to in this constant arising and passing away a phenomena that we all experience in life on a moment-to-moment basis that life is truly impermanent and that our continual denial and resistance to that flow of change is why we suffer and I feel like the more that you actually lose that identification with you being the person that things are happening too then you can become like that witness and observer somebody watching the TV right and you're not as absorbed in the experience and that controlling the way and you needing to force the movie in a certain outcome right so I'd love for you to speak a little bit more about impermanence our denial with it how that causes suffering and then also your thoughts on the Buddhist view of Consciousness and self versus like no self versus perhaps the vedantic view of Consciousness as self and is that a little too woo-woo for you or what are your thoughts there as well yo so impermanence is really the the central fact that we have to get our heads around to be motivated to to look into any of these esoteric ideas right because for but for impermanence experience could be perfect right like like you could just you could figure at least in principle you could figure out how to arrange your life you know you could become wealthy enough and healthy enough and kind enough and have enough you know good friends who love you around you you could be careful enough you could maintain it all enough so that your well-being would be truly invulnerable right like it's just that you you could create kind of paradise for yourself but there's a problem with that you know in the grossest sense the the problem is death right we all die you know like if you just even if you're the luckiest one in the world and you're going to live you're going to be healthy to 130. what is that synonymous with that's synonymous with you being on the receiving end of lots of phone calls learning that people close to you have died and disappeared right so you're going to lose everyone you love if you're too lucky to be the healthiest person you know right um nothing lasts right that's the that is the problem that no matter how good experience gets anything that that wasn't here a moment ago and it suddenly appears any state of mind that wasn't here a moment ago and suddenly appears you know joy and you know creative fulfillment and love and ecstasy and Rapture really you know any drug experience or non-drug experience any psychedelic you know Insight or Insight had any other way if it wasn't there a moment ago and it's here now by definition it will disappear right and so you're you're well a durable form of well-being can't be predicated on the appearance of any change in the cut in the contents of Consciousness because it just nothing lasts right what you will be left with by definition is a memory of that experience and rehearsing that memory is itself a transitory experience that you can only extract so much joy from I mean you can think about how good that party was a week ago a month ago a year ago but it's your thoughts about it are not as good as the party and your thoughts about it are not that good when you've you know you know on the 100th reiteration right it's just not it's and so it is with any spiritual Insight that is a matter of something you're remembering uh you know some Peak experience you had yesterday you know whether you were you know on a Meditation Retreat or on acid or whatever it was if it was a change in state and now you're thinking about it it's it's a Memory right it's so like so so the ground truth of of our contemplative lives has to be what is available to be noticed now we're like well what you really have is what you can locate now and if you uh you know this this will frustrate many people because many people are living understandably with the experience that now is kind of mediocre it's not you know like that they can't locate anything especially profound now but they have had some great experiences that they can remember and that they're using this kind of landmarks on their spiritual journey what they want to get back to right so they did take MDMA uh you know a year ago and that was completely transformative and they they recognized a state of consciousness that they previously had no clue existed and they they now know that their life's journey is completely different than than they they had assumed but it's still a memory right they don't feel that way now right life isn't that good now and so if you're you know get most most people are in that situation in some sense most people are seeking happiness seeking Insight seeking fulfillment seeking some stable basis to a Feeling Good in a context in which everything is changing right and there's just no way to secure if an experience that is so good that it becomes truly indelible and it becomes the person you now are you know Moment by moment you know thereafter what is ever present what is there always to be noticed is consciousness is it's just the the the the sheer fact that it feels like something to be what you are to be aware of experience to be to be uh awake even you know even in the dream state you know potentially even in in the states of sleep between dreams I mean some of us have had experiences where we we think we think we know from the first person's diet that sleep itself is not synonymous with a loss of consciousness but that's a fairly esoteric claim uh scientifically but in any case in in in in normal Waking Life and even in dreams there's the sheer fact that it's like something to be what you are and and that that is consciousness for lack of a of a better term I mean I would also call that awareness um and it it is it is always the ground truth of of your living and caring about anything I mean there's nothing you can value outside of its potential implications for Consciousness you know whether it's your Consciousness or the consciousness of those you care about or of the consciousnesses of perfect strangers he'll he'll never meet if you care about the difference between happiness and suffering in this universe you know your own or your children's or strangers as you are right to to do and really all of our morality and ethics is based on that kind of caring what you're talking about is consciousness and its contents you're talking about the the character of experience for conscious beings um and so Consciousness is the is the basis of all experience and it does have a certain character that can be recognized and its character is in the in the Buddha sense it is selflessness it is a another term which is is profoundly misleading in English it's often used in Buddhism is emptiness right the the Sanskrit is shinyata um now emptiness is a very is a kind of a depressing term I mean people don't they don't they tend not to want more of it you know more of it when they hear about it it's like why would I want to why would I want the punch line of spiritual life to be emptiness right that just sounds like the most boring depressing thing in the world but it's you know it's not um it's not certainly not meant to be and it's not when you see its implications I mean it's not it's it it has implications of freedom and lack of contrivance and lack of you know it's centerlessness and uh it's it's it's unconstrained it's um it's you know unborn is another word that you that comes up in Buddhism um uncontaminated um and it's not constructed of anything it's not it's not built on anything it's not predicated it's not it's not contingent it's not it doesn't require any specific contents of Consciousness to be to be real right it's the prior reality of of the fact that anything is happening at all subjectively speaking and when you recognize that reality and you recognize that you are identical to it as a matter of experience there is real Freedom even in the midst of classically negative experience even in the midst of physical pain even in the midst of of profoundly negative thoughts you know profoundly negative thoughts recognized are like you know very ugly images you know on a scr on a movie screen they don't they just don't hurt the screen right they are very ugly things you know held up in front of a mirror the mirror doesn't contract the mirror doesn't recoil from ugly images right the mirror is just this this this condition in which anything can kind of effortlessly appear and Consciousness can be recognized to be that way and so so from the Buddha side you know just linguistically they tend to emphasize what it's not it's not a self it's not compounded it's not conditional it's not constructed um and so there's just this sort of knit this this negative effort of sort of disavowing any assumption about what it is right and not not reifying it not making something of it whereas in the on the advisor side coming from a a an Indian tradition that was just just filled to burst in with sort of positive assertions of religiosity and just the kind of the Hindu context in which it invite to vedanta is the the ultimate expression of wisdom there's just a lot of assertion about uh you know spiritual reality and a lot of metaphysics um so Buddhism traditionally is a reaction against all of that and it tends to maintain this reaction even again some of the language that is used and advised to uh you know you know the main indiscretion being you know capital S self right like the punch line for advice and you are the self you're not the little self you're the big self uh but you know I'm convinced that they're talking about the same experience ultimately they're just they're just asserting different things about it uh and here we're up against the limitations of language I think there's and I think there's a danger with both ways of talking about it I mean the the in the in the Buddhist frame in the danger is it becomes so dry and analytical that people get the wrong idea they think that there's something kind of Life canceling about this whole project right this is like it's no self Nirvana is the you know is the extinguishing of of of suffering but it's the kind of the extinguishing of everything else you're losing your identity you know life is is this is often it's a very current mistranslation but you know most people think the Buddhist said life is suffering right like it's all suffering there's no happiness right that's not what what the poly term duka means but it includes suffering but it the basic meaning is unsatisfactoriness a very very much because of what I just said about the the implications of impermanence right like because everything is changing there's nothing you can successfully hold on to that is unsatisfactory if you're seeking a a permanence state of satisfaction you're not going to find it here because everything is changing right uh and and you you amid that change if you think you're you're happiness depends on gratifying desire getting the next thing you want you are you are engaged by definition in a ceaseless search for gratification I mean just have to you have to keep building the house Anew every day right because it's all you know the walls are always falling down right there's just a continuous project of maintenance and that's true of our world I mean we're continually maintaining the kind of the material requisites of our well-being but the question is what are we doing with our attention Moment by moment while we do that and when once you learn to meditate you can recognize that it's actually possible to be happy before the next good thing happens right before and before you you solve the the problem that has just appeared so that before you got rid of the next negative thing that has happened right so you you you know you have a pain and you have to figure out okay now what am I going to do about it well do I have to call the doctor okay I'm gonna this is bad enough it's not going away I don't know what it is I'm going to call a doctor right at each stage along the way there's an opportunity to either be at rest and just simply do the next thing from the point of view of of already being okay you know psychologically and and spiritually contemplatively or you can be thrust into this uh Dreamscape of you know one anxious thought following the next you know thinking about the past and future and feeling feeling at each moment along the way that your well-being is entirely dependent on resolving this situation right like you could you're not going to be okay until this pain is gone until you've figured out what it is you've seen the necessary doctor and now and now it's gone right there is no there's no possibility of being okay until you have solved that problem uh and so it is with desire like you have now figured out the next thing you want you're not going to be okay until you get that thing right because the feeling of Desire itself is a kind of discomfort right like you have you recognize that okay you've got you've got a problem you've got a problem in your in your life that that that is can only be filled by a certain shaped object right and until you if until you figure out how to get United with that object whether it's a relationship or a change in your business or a change change in your health or an understanding of of what's happening in the world um you know you're living you're living with a mental state in the presence of which you're sufficiently uncomfortable that you have to rearrange the world so as to get rid of that state meditation allows you to recognize that Consciousness is already free and open and without Center even in the presence of that mental state and the thought you were just thinking that get that delivered that state itself was just an appearance that was you know happening all by itself and you break the spell and you recognize okay now you're at rest it's not to say that there's there's nothing that needs to be done you might still have a pain that you that you should go to a doctor for you might still have a business problem you need to solve but you can do it from from a state of being that recognizes we're all going to die right like like your well-being can't be predicated but winning this game can't be a matter of not dying it can't be a matter of not having pains it can't be a matter of not having business problems that you have to solve right like this is a this is a it's like you're playing a video game where the you know there are various boss fights and their various challenges and at every level it's interesting and complicated and it's always something new appearing I mean what did you expect were you expecting a video game where nothing new appeared you know like like you're expecting a place in the game where it's just like just smooth sailing without any you know impediment and you just get to stay there right like it's just that that's just not the game what a boring game yeah it would be boring and it's um I mean the truth is there are kind of medic meditative equivalence of that where you can get I mean you can the truth is I mean you can become a monk or a nun right you can become a a a monastic where all you do every hour of the day is meditate and so you have no business problems you have no relationship problems you have no kids you have no you hey you have health problems but you like you've limited the things that are on the menu to worry about you're not going to be political you're not going to worry about what's happening you know in the news you're not you you have absented yourself from any conversation that requires you to add your voice to the the complications of the world and now you're just going to pay attention to the contents of Consciousness and meditate there's a way to do uh you know I'm not um criticizing that project I mean I've spent I spent a fair amount of time on silent meditation Retreats doing just that so it was you know it's I know what that life is like you know at least for increments as long as three months at a time but um it's possible to to engage all of that very much like a you know trying to smooth out the video game to the point where it is boring but ecstatic right I mean like it's not really boring because boredom is really boredom as a state is really just our failure to pay attention to like what the ordinary state of boredom that most people are familiar with is just nothing is not nothing interesting or good enough is happening to capture your attention and you don't know how to meditate so you're waiting for something good to happen to capture your attention you're scrolling for something that's going to give you a a hit you know of dopamine or your you're changing the channels looking for something that you can disappear into because you're uncomfortable enough in your own skin you can't just stare at a wall and be happy where when you know how to meditate you actually can't just stare at a wall and be happy you just the mystery of your own being they are just as available when you're looking at a wall um so a monk or a nun you know that won't have that problem but what they can have is the availability of a very different project which is you know you know universally condemned in contemplative circles as a kind of error but it's a very pleasurable and and Arcane error which is to become to become a kind of junkie of concentration where the the concentrated mind is incredibly pleasurable right so it's just and you can be you can be explicitly concentrated in states of mind like loving kindness where you're just overwhelmed by feelings of love and compassion for all sentient beings right you can just be sort of cruising in that stream for as long as you maintain that practice so you could just be blissed out on meditation and you know it's not that it's a bad thing it's not that it's a necessarily A A misuse of a person's life I mean because when you because if that person is functioning in the world at all and meeting other people or teaching meditation to people that you that can be one of the most inspiring people you're ever going to meet I mean you meet someone who's doing nothing but meditate on loving kindness you know it's just you can get just blissed out just hanging out with that person because all they're thinking is how much they love you and how much they want you to be well and they've got no they're not thinking about their career they're not thinking about their relationship they're not thinking about um anything and you know other than they're just pushing their Good Vibes out to the the Universe um and that's real that's felt it's very real and they're and they're they're very stoned you know I mean they're in in a in a very good way high on their own Supply yeah but there is there are two things wrong with this one is it's also impermanent right like it like it it is those High states of concentration are based on this very contingent effort to pay attention to a very specific thing to the exclusion of everything else right you're just you're not available to everything else you are meditating on something very specific and you're also you can you can fail to recognize that the real freedom of emptiness the real freedom of non-duality the real freedom of selflessness is just as available in ordinary States Of Consciousness as it is in this very rarefied state of of just you know unconditional love for all sentient beings right so you the ultimate wisdom of meditation and again both in the in the Buddhist tradition and in in the Indian invited invitic one is is to recognize what Consciousness is like always and already coincident with every possible experience not just the the classically spiritual states of mind so that experience of Freedom that you beautifully shared in both the vedanta approach and Buddhist approach of emptiness once you experience once you feel and you taste that it's like oftentimes there can be kind of this Evangelical fervor of wanting to share that because it's so good you know it's like you found the biggest pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and you want to share that one of the pitfalls on the path in the irony of the spiritual process right is that putting Freedom off like if you're going to take up the project of being spiritual going on the spiritual path walking that life doing those practices the very ideal or thought of putting Enlightenment into the future admits to yourself of your own unenlightenment in this present moment and so the idea of putting Freedom into some future State denies yourself of its possible realization that that's already available to you so I'd love for you to share a little bit more about this kind of dichotomy in how we can still feel the immense benefits for meditation and realize that it's a worthwhile practice to take up and to develop mindfulness within our reality but to go on this path as sort of an initiate to some goal in the future is also to deny yourself the possible reality no yeah and that's a difficult question to resolve uh you know because so because on one level it's true in the beginning or at least seems to be true enough so as to be everyone's default starting point in the beginning you recognize that you have a problem right you're not as happy as you want to be you you suffer unnecessarily you um you know your attention is is continually bound up in thought you feel like a self you don't know what the hell I'm talking about when I say the self is an illusion right I mean like it's just it's you're stuck but you're you become sufficiently let's say through a drug experience or through some you know Peak experience that just comes over you for whatever reason you you get a glimpse of a different way of being and you're you're you become absolutely convinced that there is a there there's not just you know a matter of um religious belief or or you know some new age fraudulence right like you you don't have to believe it's not that you're you're you've taken on a new set of ideas you've you've you've had a taste of something where you recognize okay content is possible to have a very different experience Consciousness is it can be different than um is tending to be in my case so how do I get there right like I'm not I have to recognize I'm not having that experience on a daily basis and that is filth is a problem because I am seeking to be happy and I'm just not as happy as I could be and I'm just gratifying one desire after the next and yet there's this way of being that I know is possible um how to get there so there is this duality of path and goal already set up and it seems like it seems unavoidable and when you're given a technique like mindfulness again start at that starting point which is universally everyone's starting point you can't help but engage it dualistically where you're just you can now you're trying to meditate you recognize that distraction in thought is the problem it's not that thought itself is the problem you're not trying to suppress thought but you do you are trying to recognize thought as thought and you're finding that difficult because thoughts sneak up on you and all of a sudden you're dreaming about lunch and you're forgot that you were trying to meditate right you were trying to follow the breath you're following you know in and out and in and out and there's I wonder what's going to be for lunch and you didn't see that happen you didn't feel that happen it just became you and for a moment there the whole project of meditation seemed to be interrupted by the dream about lunch so it's within that that's the frame in which you're you're now engaging this spiritual path and it is dualistic you're you're you're lost and found right you're meditating and then you're not meditating and then you're coming back to meditating and when even when you're being mindful the experience of being mindful is I mean they're really in my in my framing there are really two stages to the path of mindfulness there's the dualistic starting stage which can last for a very long time and then there's the non-dual stage of where you can actually locate freedom and selflessness directly and become mindful of that right and so and so it's the dualistic stage I'm now describing which seem which you know where the problem you just posed is is just very uh captivating for people it's like Yeah I'm I can't I can't pretend that I'm at the top of the mountain because I'm at the bottom of the mountain and I see the path you know disappearing into the into the Mist up there and I'm trying to walk it um and yet I'm being told by everyone who's teaching this technique that it's not that the ego is real and that you meditated out of existence it's not that you actually polish a brick into a mirror it's not that you you know there's nothing to really really accomplish you just have to pay sufficient attention to recognize that it's the pain sufficient attention part they can seem laborious and can seem like you know you're you're you're doing something and it's great it's almost by definition gradual because it doesn't appear to be here now but the truth is it's actually not it's this is there's an illusion here that just has to be penetrated and when that when that happens for anyone is is just a matter of uh you know luck on some level uh you know it's not that you can't do things that are that are valuable to sort of Orient toward it and and you know the practice of meditation is the most valuable thing I think anyone can do to to become available to this Insight but when you have this insight into selflessness or into non-duality or emptiness depending on how you want to talk about it one of its Hallmarks is you recognize okay that this this was always already the situation right it's not this is not something newly created by my meditative efforts this is I mean here's there are many analogies no analogy is great but these are the various analogies that I that I've used one is that may have ever been you going to a restaurant or a store and there's a there's a full-length mirror along one wall like you know Flora ceiling mirror and you might have a let's say it's a restaurant you might be halfway through your meal before you recognize that everyone over there on that side of the room is is just in the the same people you're sitting with but they're in a mirror right so like the restaurant is like half the size you thought it was right that sudden phase transition is psychologically and perceptually interesting because nothing has actually changed about the the visual experience right like the oh the light and the color in the shadow is all the same but you suddenly have this new understanding of of what is real right and you can make and and you know one one way to sharpen that up is like let's say let's say the mirror is such that it's really just not clear even if someone told you that over there that's not the world that's a mirror right you're not you're being confused by your eyes but you could imagine a mirror you know sufficiently set up you know in an Artful enough way and reflecting just you know the right part of the world such that that would not even be obvious even if you were staring straight at it and given the instruction no no you just have to look at it closely enough you'll see that's just there's no depth to that circumstances just as well you're you're looking at light on a wall you're not looking at at people and events and you know beautiful beautiful and ugly and nothing's happening over there right you're you're confused um but imagine what would happen if you know let's say a teacher you know a zogen master a Zen master somebody who could actually get through to you on this topic they walk over to the mirror and they just put their hand right on it you know they just wrap their Knuckles on the glass and all of a sudden and given that stimulus you might say oh okay well now now I see it right but nothing has really changed right it's like it was there you were looking at it the whole time and yet now you have this this conclusive understanding of what is what uh an analogous thing happens with mindfulness where you're paying attention to to thoughts and Sensations and emotions and you know getting lost in thought and coming back to the breath and coming back to the feeling of walking or whatever the object of mindfulness is at the moment um at a certain point the sense that there is a a meditator the sense that there's a center to this experience sense that there's a thinker in addition to the flow of thought the sense that there's a place from which you can aim attention to be meditating on anything all of that just disappears right like either the center drops out and you discover your own absence in in a very conclusive sense and then that becomes the thing you can be mindful of right and then there are a few paths to practice that teach this very explicitly and Target it uh in a very precise way uh and you know the you know the one that was most useful to me who came from the Tibetan tradition it's called the zocchin teachings also mahamudra within the Tibetan tradition does this there are certain variants of Zen that kind of hit this point in a precise way although you know I would argue with less Precision I mean you can spend a lot more time in the Zen tradition to my eye wondering whether you're doing it right whereas in in hisokin context it's it's just you know you know you're not doing it right and then you then you know you're doing it right like it's much more precise um in the advisor tradition the the same is true I you know it's again differences in emphasis begin to matter like you can spend a lot of time in an invite to context depending on the teacher just talking about all this stuff and feeling that there is no methodology Beyond just talking about it because it was advised to you get such a you tend to get such an uncomfortable uncompromising criticism of every dualistic method that I mean advaita is so alert to the problem you posed which is the sense that I'm far away from the goal right like I'm even conceiving of Enlightenment proves to me that I'm not enlightened right because I'm you know here I'm what I'm left to to be aware of is in some sense the evidence of my unenlightenment I mean that's what I'm mindful of I'm mindful of the fact that a moment ago I was lost in thought and I now I'm now I'm trying to pay attention to the breath so as to not do that again right like it's just me here meditating right um so but in advaita you know this is the people will have heard of people like Ramada maharshi or nisarga data Maharaja or punjaji who you know who I studied with was a disciple of Ramon maharshi um or Ramesh balsagar who's a who is a disciple of uh nisargadas um these are two a couple of modern teachers but there are many others the the emphasis on the illusoriness of of of Duality the the fact that there is no path there is no goal there is no one to accomplish it it's always already the case that becomes so that path is so steep that for many people it's just like a brick wall I mean you just kind of slam into it and you're left with somebody saying effectively like either you're going to understand what I'm saying right now but you know before I get to the end of the sentence or it's hopeless or like like it's just you know there's no one to do it there's no one to try Consciousness is already free of self and you either recognize that right now or you're going to leave this room telling yourself a story that you have to meditate and you have to be a spiritual seeker and that's all part of the bad dream that you haven't woken up from so either you wake up now or not right and that that is the the methodology that advaita implements again and again and again Ad nauseam and that's why you have people who spend you know they can spend years just hanging out with their favorite Guru just talking the talk of advaita and maybe not recognizing this thing right or maybe having Peak experiences which they then remember as you know the the moment where they they glimpsed it but they can't find it again in their moment to moment paying attention to to experience um so what I think I mean the the sweet spot for me and again it's it's not that there aren't pitfalls you know in various moments depending on how you talk about it but the sweet spot is to acknowledge the illusoriness of this to acknowledge that it's a Consciousness is already this way but to recognize that there there is a Precision required and an honesty like an intellectual honesty required and it's just like what is it that you can notice now right what what is available to to attention now and it it in my experience it requires a certain amount of training and mindfulness to actually be rigorously honest about what is you know what experience is like now and it's like to like validate it within your own experience versus just like an intellectual thing right yeah and and also or just a pretense I mean you know I've met people who spent a lot of time with with punji I mean I mean Punchy was kind of a unique case because he was he was as amazingly charismatic teacher I mean he was just this you know to all appearances just this wonderfully free being right and he certainly claimed to be enlightened or I mean who's not hiding his light under a bushel I mean he just he was he claimed to be the real real deal and he seemed like the real deal and he was totally uncompromising in his his in the non-duality of his non-duality right he would not more so than his teacher Ramana maharshi I mean Romana would say things like you must make every effort to become effortless right like he would he would he would play with The Duality non-duality component of it and acknowledge that for many people even for him in certain cases there was a path like precursor to his being stably aware of this truth he was talking about um but punjaji tended not to acknowledge any any validity to anything path like right so if you'd say so he would just you know his analogy for what meditation was like you've come to him with like you know 20 kilograms of you know bricks on your head and you're complaining of how uncomfortable you are and what every you know tradition of meditation does is just add more bricks to the pile like here a little we got we've got a brick made of Jade we're gonna put that on here let's see if you feel better right and so like it's just it's completely it's it's completely ill-conceived the logic is just backwards you know there's nothing you're going to pay attention to now strategically as a spiritual practice that is going to be any use at all in this project because the it is the the effort you're making is predicated on a false assumption everything about it the beliefs the the affectations the the changes in your identity the wearing of beads the the you know your interest in certain books versus other books the whole project is a just an atombration of your unha of of the very thing that's making you unhappy right it's like your your problem is seeking and you can't seek your way out of it right that's that's the and so emphasizing that to the exclusion of every other message leaves a lot of people feeling like okay well like like that door is closed right I'm not going to become a Buddhist I'm not going to become a meditator I'm not gonna I'm gonna get rid of my beads I'm gonna like I'm I'm not going to be I'm not gonna have any spiritual identity it's just it's all all of that's a waste of time and now I'm just here considering the the project anew and what happened with two things happened to many people with 2003 one is there are many people who claim to be enlightened who obviously weren't right like like they had some brief moment with him and then they went away and set up shop as gurus and and they you know were just um you know it worked for some people and it didn't work for others but it was just they they had a belief about themselves that they're now these these you know realized beings again it was a a new self-concept right and and in some cases it was it was not that it was totally unwarranted I mean they were having you know very um compelling spiritual experiences they were they were very meditative people they spent a lot of time on this project and they got to punji and he basically deputized them as gurus uh but uh which he did to everyone I mean literally anyone who would say anything positive in his presence he would basically just say you know you're gonna go you're gonna do great work in in America right and if you were the kind of person who who you know wanted to do you know wanted to set up shop as a guru you you know you could take the ball and run with it um so either that happened or people just felt that um all spiritual efforts were were doomed but then they just went on to live you know ordinary lives where they're making all kinds of other efforts to be happy all the ordinary ones to you know just figure out how to be and have good relationships and you know not be addicted to alcohol and and yeah like like they're just they're just trying to solve all the ordinary problems everyone's trying to solve trying to feel good and yet they now know that meditation is [ __ ] right it's like that so that they were left in in a worse place on some level right I mean it's almost like being told you know at bottom you really are you know an Olympic level athlete right like you are like if you could only just sit properly like just get into the right posture you'd recognize that you're just you're you're you're Usain Bolt right you're like you know you're as fast as any man who's ever run the 100 meter dash right and now you have this belief about yourself but you just can't quite I mean and you're trying to you might be trying to pretend to be a great athlete you know or but you can't actually function that way um or you just you have this belief that it's you know working out is hopeless dieting is hopeless get in shape is hopeless um and you hope someday you're going to be fit right it's like it's just the door to the Dharma gets closed and it's there's no alternative so um and this is actually some clue as to why within the zogshan tradition they're very concerned that you not give the non-dual teachings out to without a proper context because people can get the wrong idea and you know honestly I mean I walk that line um however I do over at waking up and it's not you know I'm not sure I always walk it correctly in every instance um I mean my feeling is you want to be rigorously honest about what is actually true for you in each moment what seems to be true for you in each moment you need a a certain amount of mindfulness to to do that I think people should be disabused of all kinds of spiritual and religious illusions that that um you know you don't have to you don't have to take anything on faith to engage this project but I do think it's important at the soonest possible opportunity to be told that actually you can realize something truly fundamental and life-changing very soon and it and it is the Hallmark of it is that it's always available it's not something that you have to you know get a lot of momentum behind you to get it to get back to right it's not something it's not a peak experience that by definition will require and you know a week of Silence on Retreat to get back to or another tab of acid to get back to him it's like is it is it is coincident with with this moment however ordinary it seems and it could be arrived at by as simple as this uh one deep breath and you're back in that state right that you can experience I think it's so valuable to have teachers and individuals that can point out and slap their hand on the mirror and and point out things with and help guide your attention to the nature of reality in a more true sense yeah there's also and you kind of touch on it a little bit which I want to dive a little bit deeper here is that it is possible to wake up beyond the illusion of self and still not have grown up beyond your own characterological defects you can have a profound disidentification with your own thought and yet still act like an [ __ ] or worse and we've seen many cases of this right yeah and so I would love to dive into this a little bit more because it's one half of the pie right or you know potentially less but it you to just pursue the disidentification with thought and and this path of waking up without realizing that uh your character logical defects and essentially Shadow material that you have not worked through will have a profound impact on people in your relationships in the outer world if you uh don't resolve as well yeah and also just differences in culture right like becoming enlightened doesn't get you a new culture all these like it's like and if you if you don't know anything about quantum mechanics before you become a Buddha you're not going to know anything about quantum mechanics after you become a Buddha maybe leaving aside what people believe about the powers of a Buddha and there's just the fact that there there can be a quite a distance in in time between having genuine Insight in the in the in what I'm talking about here selflessness or non-duality and truly stabilizing that Insight so that you never Overlook it again right so I mean for me I'm not I make no pretense of being fully enlightened or a Buddha or like at the end of this project right like I'm I'm you know I try to be rigorously honest about just what I can authenticate as a matter of my direct experience what is plausible to me to believe in on the on the basis of of what I know or think I know and what it's pretty pretty clear to me I I'm not experiencing or have an experience and so you know I'm I I still definitely get lost in thought right the dream reasserts itself now what it's like to wake up from the dream is is different than it it's different than it would be if I were practicing dualistically right like when you're when you're practicing mindfulness mindfulness dualistically you get lost in thought and you notice it and then let's say you come back you'll see you're meditate on the breath you come back to the breath that there's still a lot of power in that I mean just the learning to exercise this particular muscle of just getting distracted and then recognizing it and then being no longer being distracted coming back to the breath or coming back to the sounds or anything you couldn't you can notice do you even dualistically that that allows you to unhook from the emotional and behavioral implications of any one of those thoughts right so if it's a thought of anger and you notice it and then you come back to just breathing that gives you a degree of Freedom that most people don't have I mean most people are just angry from that moment on and they're just going to say or do whatever they do on that basis they see no alternative but to feel identical to their thoughts but if you're doing this dualistically it seems like the sense of self is maintained throughout that whole process like I feel angry and then oh I'm supposed to be meditating why okay you know back to the breath but as the meditator has been preserved like you're just you're it's still me in here meditating making an effort um once you have really broken the spell and can practice in a non-dual way the moment you notice the thought the moment you notice you've become angry and your the Dreamscape of thought has captured you not only does the thought just unravel the way all thoughts do I mean they're just they're it's amazing the thoughts do anything at all to push us around because I mean when you actually look at them these just the most gossamer you know bits of language or imagery I mean there's nothing there really so the thoughts unravel whether you're looking at them dualistically or not or non-dualistically but the moment you recognize a thought is a thought coincident coincident with that recognition you notice there's no one recognizing it I mean there's no Center to Consciousness it's just Consciousness and it's it's contents and and there's freedom in that right so it's that you're not left with the problem of okay I better get the [ __ ] back to the breath because this is a long project right like this is I've been on this Retreat for a week and this is still happening I'm getting angry what is like oh now I'm thinking again what the like that so like it's that that iteration just is perpetually feels like a problem that proves you're unenlightened and far from your goal as you you know put it at the outset right here and yet when you can practice non-dualistically you recognize that the goal is already here you can in in zocchian terminology you can take the goal as the path like your next moment of path is enjoying the freedom of of non-duality in that moment you know it may be only for a moment right so so the The crucial Point here though is that even if you're practicing non-dualistically you're still very unless you're some you know Adept you know or Prodigy who the moment you break through for the first time you you know you're you're done you're you're stable for the rest of your life you're still going to be fluctuating between enjoying Consciousness as it is without distraction and being lost in the Dreamscape of thought right and because you're still going to be caught by thought it matters what kinds of thoughts you have right because you're going you're going to be doing something on the basis of those thoughts you're going to be saying something you're going to be captivated by something you're going to be wanting something and if you're a guru who really wants to have sex with his prettiest students that's who you're going to be right like you could you could be punctuating that with genuine insights into non-duality but if you don't have an F if you've come from a culture where that's actually not even a bad thing like that's just Tantra right you're just of course you should you could have sex with anyone you want you're the guru right you're like that if you come from a theocracy and there's no you know HR department who's going to say Hey listen actually it's not a great thing to be I mean some of these students are married there's a power differential here you know like they there's a lot of projection going on you know this is unfair this is uh ethically unwise this is you know you're actually and in each one of those moments you're being a selfish [ __ ] and you're not recognizing it because you don't have that much mindfulness um you know you're not going to see the problem and you're and yes we have you know lived with the consequences of that in many spiritual communities many gurus who were not actually frauds in the normal sense have behaved terribly with their students because they essentially they became rock stars in a very you know isolated community and gratified their desires there's still extant desires on that basis right I mean just think of how tempting it is to be I mean basically you're you're like you know you're John Bon Jovi you know but you're on an island of people who are projecting all of their spiritual hopes and fears onto you right it's like it's like you're it's like you're a rock star with power right you know you're like you're it's it's ridiculous you know and most egos in that situation don't handle it very well right uh so it's not especially mysterious that the spiritual teachers misbehave um and it's also not mysterious that even people with genuine spiritual insights can misbehave in those ways because they're again they're getting lost in thought much of the time because they're not they're not fully done with this with this process of of recognizing the nature of Consciousness um and as as to whether anyone actually I'm not sure I've met anyone who's totally fulfilled the process I've certainly met people who've claimed to have done so but um and I've met people who I felt were further along than than I was and then were very inspiring to me but on that basis but um no I think it's it's uh it's important to recognize that on some level spiritual insight and you know even non-duality isn't enough to get us everything we want and our right to want in this world I mean we're it's not enough you know a bunch of enlightened Buddhas even is not enough to help us build the civilization that really works right there's a lot there's just a tremendous amount of knowledge that that we want that you don't get by just meditating more even on even correctly on the nature of emptiness I mean you know you don't spontaneously understand how to improve and economy right or a a medical system you know or to make to engineer airplanes so that they they crash less and less and less and ultimately don't crash at all right it's like that's all a matter of very specific forms of of um you know iterative knowledge acquisition that you know perfectly unenlightened people are qualified to do right it's like like this is the whole project these projects are are orthogonal to one another it's just it's we want good Aircraft engineers and we want Buddhas and occasionally you might want you know if you're an aircraft engineer it might be nice to be a Buddha if you're a Buddha you probably don't care about being an aircraft engineer but we need both and they are they are different projects and and The crucial piece for your question with respect to the ethics is ethics has a lot in common with aircraft engineering and is not fully captured by the project of just recognizing the self as an illusion right because especially in this this interval of where you're still just working out the consequences for yourself of of this Insight right and you're not fully stable because if you're not fully stable all you have are ideas and thoughts and culture with which to manifest and if you have a culture that just hasn't figured out certain core ethical principles as many cultures haven't uh you know it's like that one put you know when punji had to get his um had to find his niece a husband in India he had no brighter idea about how to go about doing that than to put it you know to take out you know classified ad with her picture in it you know strategically lightened to make her look more light-skinned than she was because that's valuable in Indian culture right that you just like it's it's just like it's racism is the wrong concept I guess but there's some version of of uh you know bias you know prejudice against dark skin even within Indian culture uh that that that's a completely rational uh marketing tool for his niece you know to find a husband this is what the Buddha's you know the self-proclaimed enlightened Adept is doing to get to to to find a husband for his niece okay is that the optimal way to solve the social problem of how do you get young people together and to find to have satisfying marriages I doubt it right it's like so he didn't have by virtue of being the most blissed out and wise and compassionate person you know I had ever met at that point he had exactly zero insight into how to solve this kind of social problem um there's just more you need more than than just the the the Deliverance of your own personal freedom powerful I think it's such an important understanding and framework for people just to tap into a little bit here as well because they are both very very important and one without the other is is incomplete the mirror recognition that Consciousness is like a mirror is inherently liberating and I'm just curious for you a little bit more into your own personal journey and into your into your story what have been a few pivotal moments into where it's shifted something and allowed you to Pivot into an even more honest and devoted inquiry to this path because you very much devoted your life into this this understanding this work sharing with people and your own personal life going on Retreat earlier in your life and Exploration with psychedelics and I think it's really important for people to first hand have these different experiences where they can validate within their own reality what we're speaking to and so I'd love for you just to share a little bit more a couple of those big pivots for you yeah um so yeah my first experience that was relevant to any of this was with MDMA so I think I was 18. and um it had been it was given to me at like at that point It Was 1980 that was 19. I was I think it was like 1986. it just become schedule one I think in 85 but like until then it was very actively being used in the Therapeutic Community very much for you know spiritual and and you know psychological insight I mean it was just it was a you know it was not yet a club drug it was not I mean maybe it was I it was too young to know but it was there was there was no Rave scene and it was I I knew of no one my age who had taken it and you know there were no parties where it was being passed around so MDMA otherwise known as Molly or ecstasy um so I took it very much you know it's been given to me you know really is just kind of a a prompt to spiritual realizations like someone said listen this you might really learn something if you took this and and I think I um I think I waited I think I waited like two years until I actually thought all right maybe that maybe that's worth trying this um but when I finally took it I I took it therefore very much with the intention of realizing something about the nature of my own mind that I hadn't yet realized and that's what happened I mean I was I was sitting with one of my best friends at the time and we're just having a conversation waiting for this this the drug to arrive and recognize at some point along the way that we suddenly were very different people that we just that we were for the first time I mean this he had an analogous experience but I really can only speak about my own um for the first time in my life I was just I was unencumbered by concerns about myself that I didn't even know had been operative right it's like for the first time I was not paying attention to the way the person was looking at me like like the change in expression from the on the other person's face was no longer getting read back in into a um a self-conscious mapping of my own you know performance my own worth my own like I was just not I was not looking at myself through another person's eyes on any level I was just I had a hundred percent free attention to just look at my friend right and so he's talking and I'm just listening and there's no and I was not comparing myself to him anymore I was not it was like and when all this got Stripped Away it was just that the freedom of of having it gone was um just astounding like it was like I had it really was analogous to having carried a tremendous burden and never you know never having anything to compare it to right and to suddenly be relieved of it it's only in its absence that you you feel how painful it was to be that sort of person right and so so it's I I must have the fact that I took the drug in the first place with the intention I had means that I had some awareness that there was some project here to you know to at least give my attention to that something wasn't optimal about my moment-to-moment experience but I really was I mean it's very hard for me to recapture who I was before that experience because it was you know it was such a revelation that there was so much more to me and my own being you know psychologically than I had experienced up until until that point you know and if I just have no I don't know what it would like if I could go back in time and talk to the teenager I was before I had that experience I just I mean I there would have been no basis to get through to that person about any of these uh any of these topics right so it was just I you know it's very hard to say that taking an illegal drug as an indispensable experience but you know in my case it felt like it was like I don't I just don't think I think I was so closed down and unavailable it's not that I was profoundly unhappy I was you know I was a pretty happy high functioning kid but it's just I had no interest in the pointed in this direction like I was just interested in the world I was interested in doing fun creative things in the world but the nature of Mind did not interest me the nature of Consciousness did not interest me and my own uh religion and all of its promises so you know certainly seemed just intrinsically false um so I just was um I mean I guess on some level I was just convinced that there was no more interesting game to play than being a successful ego right and a knowledgeable ego and a just it just you know you could there's a way to win this game as an ego and that's what I wanted to do right and so and the cramp of that the confinement of that was not at all obvious to me I mean the one thing that that made it clear I had forgotten it and went until after I took MDMA but the one moment in my life really I think the only moment in my life that where I recognized that there was some interesting riddle to solve that I just wasn't even entertaining was a moment when I went on Outward Bound which was what was this um I probably still is this kind of outdoor leadership uh school that lasted in my case was like 23 days in the mountains of Colorado over over a summer when I was 16. and so you're hiking for you know endless miles if you know between clouds of mosquitoes for you know day after day and um but it culminates with a a three days what they call a solo where you're just you're not you're not hiking you're not moving around you're just camped somewhere by yourself and fasting all you have is water and a journal right and so I was up at 11 000 feet you know just in front of this gorgeous Alpine Lake you know it's just like with you know more stars overhead than I'd ever seen in my life uh for three days and nights fasting and writing in my journal and all I could think to write in my journal were just like lists of foods I wanted to eat when I got home and the experiences I wanted to have and all the people I missed and I mean nothing came out of me in those 72 hours but just a a a Litany of complaint about how lonely I was how sad I was how how uncomfortable I was in isolated it's just I was profoundly unhappy like I was like I was the kind of the person who if you put him in solitary confinement would just have died of exposure to his own mind right I mean it was just it was it was a catastrophe and yet I came off those three days it's like there was like a you know the last day of the maybe the it was like days you know maybe 18 through 21 of a 23-day course so the last couple of days of of you know integration um were days where I could see that those three days of isolation had a very different effect on many other people in the group right so like and most people were older than me I was 16 which I think is the youngest you could be on our bound and but so a lot of people were in their late 20s you know or mid-20s and they had a profoundly different experience I mean they they came off three days of solitude having had a like a life-changing you know Insight of some kind and I remember thinking I have no idea how that's possible like like and that was like just barely just barely interesting to me like wait like I don't know what happened for them but like that is like like I'm now surrounded by people who just told me that like having Nails drilled into their head was you know a a life-changing positive experience so I knew there was something I was missing but I didn't think about that until like two years later after I took the MDMA I just said oh okay now I understand that there's there's like I'm in sort of a mansion of mental life and I've been confined to the pantry you know just trying to figure out how many Oreos I can eat and you know there's just you know everything else awaits My Discovery so um so it was that so after I had that experience on MDMA I started reading books about you know meditation and spirituality and religion and that started a you know more than a decade of me spending most of my time just focused on these kinds of questions and I did uh you know many many Retreats mostly in a Buddhist context I mean many of the Posner Retreats you know practicing mindfulness dualistically for a very long time and I probably spent about a year on retreat where I think it would be safe to say that you know even after a year on Retreat I wouldn't fully understand the kinds of things I was I've been talking about with you today like I was still very much a a dualistic practitioner of mindfulness where even if I had had glimpses of selflessness like there were definitely moments on like a three-month Retreat where I was concentrated enough where there seemed to be you know clear breaks in my sense of self like I'm just I'm listening to the sound of a bird say and for a moment there there's just hearing right there's just there's not a there's not a one there's not one hearing there's not the thing heard there's just like a pure experience of hearing right but I didn't know how to get back there and it seemed to be contingent upon me building up many many continuous moments of mindfulness and really a kind of heroic levels of concentration doing nothing but practice in silence for you know 16 hours a day right and that's what these Retreats were so I spent about a year like that on silent Retreat uh before again in like increments of you know one week to three months long mostly in the States but I also but I made many trips to India and Nepal um the study with various teachers but it wasn't until I connected with uh zogchan and and a few specific teachers in Nepal and uh puntaji you know the the one invited teacher always spent a fair amount of time with in India where that sort of the the criticism of my dualistic efforts to practice kind of got under my skin enough that I actually began to practice differently and that that sort of changed everything and then I did some Retreats thereafter in a more non-dual way but um yeah I mean that was you know that had my 20s were the project of my 20s was really all of that you know going to India studying and Nepal and and coming back and doing Retreat and then going back and studying with various teachers and so uh I think that so you you went on various where like you said upwards of three months you would go on a retreat right and this was all throughout your 20s I'm also curious did Alan Watts in particular have any impact on you in your 20s as a writer a speaker yeah well I listened to pretty much all of his stuff online not online on audio cassette it's now all online it's now we have his full archive yeah on waking up which is wonderful um I mean Watts was one of the the great communicators of this and it was just so entertaining to listen to him um I mean he's not he's not he's not focused on the the detailed mechanics of of meditation right you're not getting a lot of practice talk from him but like as far as the big picture insights of you know just what is Eastern wisdom and you know how should we think about it and he's he's one of the best speakers we've ever had it's really wonderful okay cool yeah I was curious because I know you guys got the got them all on your platform and yeah before we move on because there is there's still quite a few things I want to dive into here uh in regards to Consciousness if you had to right now put in a time capsule your best answer and thesis and final thoughts and words on the hard problem of Consciousness and we fast forward to the to the moment that problem is solved if it is right and we then go back and look at Sam Harris's words and thoughts on the matter what would you say if you had to put put that in put that in there well so so it depends on what the solution is so the hard problem is that and this this comes to us courtesy of the philosopher David Chalmers who coined the phrase um he pointed out that there's they're all like quote easy problems of understanding the mind which is just you can understand how for instance with vision you know there's there's light that comes in and hits the retina and gets you know so you have you have uh electromagnetic energy that gets transformed into electrochemical energy in the nervous system you have just a a concaten a series of of neuronal firings as a result of of light hitting the retina um and that gets encoded in visual cortex in various patterns and there's what's called a retinotopic mapping of the visual scene on visual cortex and there's certain cells that are responsive to lines at a certain angle and we've come to understand all of this um it's very complicated but nothing in principle is profoundly counter-intuitive and we could every step along the way we can we can understand what light is doing to specific molecules and the retina how those molecules affect you know Downstream neuronal firing and then what happens how neurons function physically chemically Electric chemically um how how genetic you know encoding a protein relates to all of that receptors and and neurotransmitters like the there's just a it's Clockwork at bottom it's it's a very it's you know it's wet it's messy it's complicated but it is really um our intuitions run all the way through as you as you as you drill down on the micro of details there are no surprises like like the causality makes sense all the way through what doesn't make sense at all and what what is is profoundly counterintuitive is that at some point along the way there's something that it's like to see right like like we we could imagine building a robot on the principles of of our visual system and having it visually navigate the world based on based on visual data but have it effectively be unconscious if there'd be nothing that it's like to be that robot that robot would not experience Vision in any way all the while performing functionally in the world as a visual as a system that that's making use of visual data in our case we have the full pyrotechnics of conscious life we have we we have the conscious experience of vision and that is fundamentally mysterious there's no description of the the micro events that makes the emergence of of conscious vision perspicuous understandable and what's more worse and the reason why this is really truly the hard problem as opposed to just yet another easy problem that we may one day solve is that it it seems impossible to imagine what could be an explanation that would be it would intuitively run through it's like is it you can't say oh but if only neurons were firing at this frequency well then okay then I understand why it's there's something that it's like to see right no no frequency is it seems even relevant right it's like it just it simply does not matter what frequency it is or how many neurons you get or what their pattern of connectivity is or what neurotransmitters are involved or none of that matters like that all of that is as strange as saying that you know if a if if a wind blows across a trailer park at exactly 146 miles an hour and the trailer park is filled with watermelons and and beer uh that whole system becomes conscious becomes a conscious mind there's something that it's like to be a trailer park right but if you take away the watermelon it's not conscious anymore right that's it's a mere statement of a miracle right and that's what it seems like it would be would be happening in the case of any story about the the um the Wheel Works of neurophysiology so that's so so the hard problem is if Consciousness emerges on the basis of unconscious complexity you know first you have unconscious information processing first you have unconscious molecules you know chemicals bouncing around but at a certain point of integration at a certain point of of encoding the lights come on right if that's the way things work that you know the those of us who are enamored of the the hard problem uh would say it's always going to seem like a miracle right like it's like that's not understandable that's that's the equivalent of saying before the Big Bang there was truly nothing and then everything exploded into being right like there's not just not just that there were there was nothing there was no heat and no energy and no matter there were no laws of nature either there was like nothing but then in a certain moment everything appeared including the laws of nature by which anything would further appear it okay that if you believe that Ms you know as Terence McKenna once said if you can believe that you can believe anything like that it seems to be the the limit case for extreme credulity I think right so like it's it's like it's that is the the hardest thing possible to believe because because nothing is real nothing not just you know not having space time but like nothing not having laws of nature not having anything right real nothing is precisely what can't give rise to something let alone everything um analogously true unconsciousness yeah true nothing that it's like to be this system is precisely the thing that can't give rise to the something of Consciousness right and so there's it doesn't matter how you order it it doesn't matter it just it's not going to be intelligible now that doesn't mean that it isn't true right so like like I'm willing to say that it could just be a fact that neurons of in a certain configuration give rise to Consciousness and if you change your configuration slightly there's nothing that it's like to be that set of neurons right uh so Consciousness could truly be an emergent property of unconscious complexity and I'm just not capable of understanding how it's just that's it's just a brute fact right and okay so that's that's just we would have to acknowledge that that is a condition which we don't actually have a normal scientific explanation like our our scientific explanation of of life is truly a reduction that works and it's like you it used to be that people thought there was a profound mystery between distinguishing living and and non-living objects right so like there's a living system like an animal and a non-living system like a machine and there must be some like life force that explains this difference now if you leave Consciousness aside right and you're actually just talking about the the you know how we Define life and just what a system has to be to qualify as as living you know how it how it metabolizes energy and reproduces and I mean like the the definition of life is is a little uh fuzzy at the boundaries but um for instance it's it's not entirely clear whether you know it applies to something like a virus say but it was just it's a semantic judgment way as to whether it would but um once you once you define your terms and you and you understand something like you know the molecular basis of inheritance you know just how DNA works and how you know cells divide and how uh you know gametes uh uh you know form and and uh get together and how it's like like there is no there is no more to the mystery like we know we now know how babies get made and and we know how we pass on our genes and we know why kids resemble their parents and we know and we the biology of inheritance is you know again it's very complex there's still things we don't totally understand about it but there are no real Mysteries right like it's it's just it is a it is a concatenation of physical facts that when you drill down far enough it's it's amazing but it's not confounding right yeah but add Consciousness to this picture it just there's no place for it like there's just no there's no evidence of Consciousness in the universe apart from our direct experience of it and there's no indication that it would exist or should exist apart from our direct experience of it it's just it's and and yet our direct experience of it is the most is the only thing really that we can be certain of right like so so far be there's some you know imbecilic statements that occasionally come out of philosophy and neurosciences suggest that Consciousness might be an illusion right Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that simply cannot be an illusion right because it is the thing that would give rise to any possible illusion right like if even if you were completely confused about what reality is even if you're in the Matrix right or this is all a simulation you know on in some alien supercomputer or you're you know you're a brain in a vat or you're psychotic and you're you could be confused about everything you can't be confused that something seems to be happening or that that seeming is what we mean by consciousness so so Paradise you know semi-paradoxically though we don't understand it we don't understand how it it arises or even you know at bottom whether it does in fact arise I mean it could be a more fundamental constituent of the Universe um though I'm not sure what I believe about that um though we don't understand it and we don't understand its place in nature we can understand that it's the one thing we are absolutely certain of in each moment and it's the basis upon which any further certainty would be would be granted to us about anything I mean it is it is it is our conscious life that is the is the it's the only condition in which we do science in which we think about you know Eternal truths of mathematics or anything else I mean it's like we we cut all of cognition effectively you know even though it's we understand that in our case it very likely has unconscious precursors right I mean they're they're cognitive operations there's a little there's a lot to our mental lives that seems to be happening in the dark but anything that we can actually notice and talk about and directly experience is by definition was something that's happening in consciousness that was uh so fascinating for me as a listener and just aside from being the host of the show which I now need to continue on with being uh the uh so if you had to give your answer it's would you say it's then Consciousness awareness aware yes I didn't give you the Time Capsule answer after all that Rick and Mortal I did not give you the answer so my answer is just that there's two possibilities if it emerges from unconscious complexity at some level that may be true that may actually be the right answer if that's true I think we will never understand that in the way we we want to understand any other thing like we don't there are things we understand we we really do understand them and that will not be one of those things again we understand how DNA works at least to a first approximation right we understand how it's like if you shatter a window we understand why it shatters and why it doesn't just melt right like because we understand about the lattice structure of the the molecules right it's like brittleness at the higher level is the thing you would expect to emerge given the way the the the the atoms in that substance are arranged um and so it is with the wetness of water right like it's like there are emergent properties and but yet they're understandable Consciousness is not that sort of immersion property so if this is in fact true in a hundred years if we just you know if you know the aliens land and tell us this is this is how Consciousness arises it's exactly this kind of unconscious processing that gives it that turns the lights on and look we turn the dial a little bit and the lights go out and then they're back on they're out there like here you can play with this dial as much as you want um and you'll notice that it's just exists exactly what Consciousness is in any physical system okay that's just that's amazing that's a miracle that's we don't understand it but we can just we can then live on that basis we could design conscious computers on that basis right like we could and we could design you know as I think we would want to unconscious computers that can't suffer and can't be happy and you know when you turn them off it's you're not murdering them right because they're not there's nothing that's like to be those computers we cannot make the mistake of accidentally building conscious computers because now we understand that Consciousness is you know the way the lights go on is this way and we can decide when we when we do that but I think it's more likely that we will um in the near term far before we actually think we understand the the the true neural correlates of Consciousness I think we'll build computers that we think are conscious because they just seem to be conscious you know they'll and we might get build them in such a way where they they claim to be conscious but those of us who understand the hard problem won't know you know it'll just be it'll it'll fundamentally be mysterious as to whether they're conscious and and yet will helplessly relate to them as though they are conscious because it'll seem Psychopathic not to I mean especially if you build anything like a a humanoid robot that really has appropriate facial expressions and and tones of voice and is obviously passing the touring test because it's smarter than you are and it's you know it's more it's totally aware of your emotions and it's seems to have emotions of its own because it's been built that way and uh you're now you're you'll helplessly feel like you're in relationship to another conscious being and I think most of us will just lose sight of whether the the boundary between Consciousness and unconsciousness was ever an interesting problem we just won't know you know and we'll forget about it yeah so I'm asking you to speak in to some obvious unknowns here right so you said you would say essentially to boil down your best guess is that it's probably unconscious complexity if you had well so the alternative to that is that no it doesn't in fact emerge it it it goes all the way down into the most basic constituents of matter or this opposition between matter and Consciousness is I bought a misconceived and there's some you know the the the the technical phrase for this in philosophy is is neutral monism I think that was Bertrand Russell who gave us this phrase but there's some neutral position conceptually from which to understand mind and matter that doesn't admit of this dualism so it's like I currently it just seems like there's there's a mystery there's the physics of things and then there's mind and Consciousness but you know now even mind it's mind without Consciousness isn't even that all that mysterious so it's really just there's physics that's unconscious and then there's consciousness and we don't know how to marry them we don't know where Consciousness comes into the picture um well let's just say it doesn't come into the picture let's say it goes all the way down let's say that there's something that is like to be an electron on some level right um doesn't mean that electron is thinking it doesn't mean that it uses language but like there's some interior dimension to everything that we would recognize as Consciousness the lights are on in some sense all the way down now I think there are reasons to be doubtful of that I mean I think that's it that it doesn't truly solve the hard problem because it's still we still have the problem of this apparent difference between everything we can be consciously aware of in our experience and the stuff that still seems to be going on in the dark that we know is related to the stuff we can be aware of right so I mean you asked me a few minutes ago uh about uh gurus who misbehave and I gave you an example of a rock star and the best I could do was Jon Bon Jovi right right so like like so I'm thinking I like I go into to uh Rockstar Rockstar search mode right I'm looking for rock stars in my memory and for whatever reason I know the names of many performers but John John Bon Jovi is the one that came up uh you know dating me and uh you know scandalizing everyone who actually cares about modern music presumably um but uh it's it's fundamental so so as aware as I can possibly be of my experience I can't be aware of the search algorithm that's happening in my brain that is promoting various rock stars to from memory and I mean I couldn't keep I can con I could consciously decide okay no John there's no way I'm saying John Bon Jovi I'm just going to wait here until I get something else right and uh something else will come but I but there's there's some set of physical events that is conspiring to you know the to curate those you know deliverances from memory that I can't inspect right and it's still I know I know my brain is doing it but it seems not to be associated with Consciousness now it's possible that there's some other way of understanding Consciousness where no there's actually they would push Consciousness back even into that which is yeah you know maybe there's a maybe there are multiple conscious points of view even in a single brain right maybe you know we the and there is something that it's like to be the part of me that was just doing the math on you know old memories right but I somehow doubt it like that doesn't that seems that doesn't seem like the most parsimonious way to to explain our experience uh in light of what we know about the brain so but these are these are fundamentally different pictures if Consciousness goes all the way down to the to bedrock um well then that's hard that that's also hard to understand but it's hard to understand anything that goes down to bedrock I mean we don't know at a certain point in science you just have to admit that you have to say you take certain things as given I mean it's just you know and whether space and time or among those Givens is a matter of debate I mean there are physicists who are trying to to find ways of thinking about physics that don't take space and time as primitive space and time or emergent phenomenon of some more basic physics but there are other approaches to physics that take space-time as primitive so anyway at a certain point you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you can't be pretending to understand the straps right like there's there's a brute fact of something that you're that you're assuming axiomatically in order to do any kind of further work of understanding anything this is true mathematically it's true uh scientifically and it's possible that Consciousness is just one of those things so um so then so then in a thousand years we might say no consciousness is one of the things you don't have to understand you know Consciousness is like space time right that's it's just the condition in which all of this is happening right or Consciousness is like you know causality right like causes perceived events We're Not Gonna We're Not Gonna spend any time trying to figure out if there's something other than deeper than causality you know the beginning of everything was the beginning we're not going to ask ourselves how the beginning began I mean like like there's just you know there's you again there's no I I think scientists there might be some exceptions here but basically science has given up on coming up with a set of laws that become perfectly self-explanatory there's going to be some brute you know axiomatic fact that it's just a starting point so so diving uh diving because I want to I'm mindful of the time that we have left I do want to touch on free will uh here a little bit you would kind of final thought is that you would probably lean towards if you had to say the best guess unconscious complexity like in a succinct way I mean because you're more qualified to speak on this than most people I mean I just I the truth is I just don't know how Consciousness arises like I would not I I on some level I would not be surprised by any any variant of this thesis it's like you know if if in fact Consciousness is integrated with matter in a way that we just fundamentally don't understand and we're misled by all of our interrogation of the brain and you know you know general anesthesia and the Consciousness seems to get you know turned off in the in those that case and it's like we just there's some other purview from which this whole problem intellectually seems different and uh we're just confused you know analogous to like you know we're dealing with you know three dimensions of space and we just have not thought about the possibility of a fourth dimension of anything right like we just haven't done the math and you know the curvature of space is um are much less space time is not something we just can't imagine because we just don't have the concept for it maybe there's something analogous there that would just makes the problem seem different but um that wouldn't surprise me and it also wouldn't surprise me if it's emerging on the basis of of information processing in some configuration and that's always going to seem like a miracle to us right so wonderful so uh again quickly if you had to say a best guess probability what do you feel is a likelihood that we will engineer Consciousness into super intelligent AGI well as I said I think the pro the far more likely situation is that we will will create the intelligence and have no idea whether it's conscious it'll be indistinguishable yeah it'll just be it'll it'll seem more conscious yes because it'll be more intelligent than us I have no doubt there there is simply no doubt that intelligence is substrate independent I mean there's just there's just no reason to think that there's something magical about biology with respect to what we mean by intelligence move just we've what we have now is already so effectively intelligent that you know even if you're going to go come at it in a piecemeal way even if even even if forget about trying to perfectly emulate human intelligence let's just take the top hundred things we care about as as you know acts of cognition uh and intelligence each one of those can you know just we already know it's like arithmetic yes you can build a superhuman calculator and all of us have one in our pockets right now you know it's just your smartphone is better at arithmetic than you will ever be and just add just add up all of those capacities we know they're all substrate independent and we know recognizing faces and recognizing the gender of faces and recognizing voices and all of that is you know all of these human attributes are accomplished in in silico now right so I think it's it's not going to be much longer before we have systems that pass the Turing test in all the ways that could matter to us I mean even if they seem weird in some other ways or just not quite human I mean they won't they'll fail the Turing test the moment they pass it because they'll pass it so spectacularly it'll be obvious they're not human right it's like it's already obvious that no human knows it has instant no human has instantaneous access to everything on the internet right so the fact that I can ask chat GPT something and they can give me facts more comprehensively and in a more orderly way and faster than any person can even if it's not perfect in other areas the fact that I can say you know what are the causes of World War II and it within five seconds can give me a mini essay on the cause of World War II that's better than you know any you know academic historian can accomplish in the in the same span of time all right it's already superhuman it's all I already know there's not a a little man in the Box you know typing you know his answer to me so they will be the moment they're General they'll be not human level but superhuman and the moment we give them any kind of relational capacity that matters the moment they become sensitive to our tone of voice and our facial expression and the moment we're integrated with them you know you you're you're piping your watch data or your ring data to your AI assistant so it it's been tracking your heart heart rate and sleep cycles too right it's integrating all that information for you then you're going to be talking to a machine well you know forget about a humanoid robot where it's you know going to make it seem like Westworld I mean even if it's just Siri on your phone but just the next iteration of Siri that is you know essentially chat gpt5 you know plus all of your your uh Health Data you're going to be in the presence of something that is more observant of your inner life than any person can be from the outside so it's going to know you better than your spouse knows you on some level right especially if it's reading your emails and reading your texts and it's it's read everything you've ever published and listened to all like in my case you know my wife hasn't listened to my podcasts right like I've got 300 episodes in my podcast that my virtual assistant will have heard right um my wife hasn't heard them so she doesn't know what I was thinking about on all those for all those hours right I'm going to be in the presence of Siri that uh can say sam you know you you definitely you look tired you sound tired um you're not good you here here are five things I want you to pay attention to you know this is what you forgot you wanted to do today but you sent that email to uh uh yeah it's like it will you'll sudden the moment the thing is responsive to you relationally you you are going to feel helplessly feel that you're in the presence of the smartest most perceptive person you've ever met and that's going to feel like being in the presence of Consciousness right especially if we don't I mean if if we hamstring the thing to say at every moment to remind us at every moment listen I'm just a dumb machine you're not killing me when you turn me off I'm not conscious and nothing that's like to be me you haven't solved the hard problem problem you know but that's possible but at a certain point I don't know I mean like again the for me Westworld is unimaginable because in the presence of perfectly humanoid robots which is to say we're out of The Uncanny Valley they no longer look weird they look human and they're and so their facial displays of emotion are not spooky they're just like they look human if we ever get there and I you know I don't think there's any reason to think we won't um there's no way you could have a place like Westworld where you're treating them badly and you know raping them and killing them and like like because you will feel like a psychopath you will be viewed as a psychopath by other people like you're like if that's your idea of fun if your idea of fun is to rape and kill Dolores right you're a rapist murderer right like you're like that's it like it doesn't matter that she's a robot right because it's too compelling an illusion the fact that you were able to give yourself over to the illusion with that kind of you know rapacity um proves that there's something wrong with you right and and so that like so Westworld I think is Unthinkable or at least like otherwise it would just function as a a bug light for a psychopath but um yeah so which is to say that once we're in the presence of anything like a a perfectly compelling humanoid robot it's going to be a very weird world and we're we're not going to know you know very likely we're not going to know whether they're conscious and yet we're going to helplessly relate to them as though they're they're people going into a little bit of free will so I want to actually take a moment to let everyone know that I'll link down in the description a longer podcast you did on your final thoughts on Free Will for people that want to dive deeper into this but to share uh to share like a few minutes on like your consensus on your thoughts on Free Will I think would be very valuable here because it is one of those things that once you start to dive into and realize the illusory nature of it can actually become very freeing this this inner control and arrogance that we kind of have that were in charge of reality starts to diminish a little bit it also can increase compassion that we have for all beings and this this awareness that we are not the first first author of different causes that are happening that are springing forth within us like Jon Bon Jovi is uh is rather fascinating it doesn't remove the fact that we have choice that we have responsibility but where it's originally coming from we are not uh we are not in a vacuum of sorts where we can actually choose that fully to choose to choose right yeah yeah so so to say that Free Will is an illusion is really just the flip side of saying that the self is an illusion what people mean by free will is that they are the true they they the subject the inner subject the conscious experiencer of their experience is the true author of thought and action and will right so like the the you you feel yourself to be again not the totality of your body not your beliefs about your brain but the the subject the the one who can move his attention from you know from you can see you can direct your attention to to a part of your visual field and then you can decide to get up and and go make a cup of tea like that the the the the the one who who can seize the Reigns of attention the one who can decide to to change a behavioral plan or to initiate one it feels like something to be at the center of that causality and that feeling is that is what we're calling I I mean that that's this feeling of of being a self and when you penetrate that illusion then you notice that everything is just happening all by itself like and it does not nullify the difference between voluntary and involuntary action I mean there's still a difference between deciding you want to reach for a glass of water versus you know inadvertently knocking the glass over or having a you know a Tremor that that you can't control right and you're not consciously initiated those are all differences I mean the one difference is in my reaching for a glass of water it's preceded by the thought that I wanted to take a drink of water and the the felt intention to reach if my arm was just moving and I wasn't feeling any Associated intention well then I would feel like I had alien hand syndrome and there's these there are neurological conditions like this I mean that's that's what alien hand syndrome is where the the hand just starts behaving in ways where the the inner subject doesn't feel any Associated intention and so it's like it's really it's like a foreign arm you know and it's you know as you can imagine quite disconcerting um so getting rid of Free Will doesn't obviate any of those distinctions it's just it gets it gets rid of this fundamental illusion that there's that there's someone in there's a subject in the driver's seat who can do the Willing who can do the Desiring who can do the who can initiate the next thought as though who stands Upstream of all of these of all of this uh all these patterns that produce uh intentions and and further actions so but but again the illusion is so powerful for people that they they feel that there really is a mystery here where it's so like they they know that they have free will because they know that they ourselves right and they know that they can decide to do one thing versus the other and they know that it feels a certain way to do that and so the buck really seems to stop here in my my conscious sense of my own subjectivity and agency and then they're told okay but actually in the dark behind all that there's this whole concatenation of causes for which you're totally unresponsible I mean you're you're you didn't pick your parents you didn't pick your jeans you didn't pick all of the influences to the nervous system that got built on the on the basis of your genetic inheritance so literally like everything the fact that you have a brain the fact you have a brain in precisely this Conformity the fact that it was you know tuned by all of its its collisions for the all these years with you know an environment you did none of that right and yet that is all of that that whole mechanism is 100 of the explanation for the next thing you do right so when when I have to think of of a a rock star and I think of Jon Bon Jovi in what sense like uh the conscious subject in me is just waiting to hear what comes out of the dark right it's like it's like I'm just it's like I went for so I I pushed the you know deliver Rockstar name button and the truth is like you know there's no place to stand where my authorship really is is um visible because like Upstream of of that choice was well why was I looking for a rock star I could have I could have been thinking of something else like the category rock star was not something I consciously initiated everything is being promoted out of the dark on some level I mean you you you can't think a thought until you think it right like you there's there would be an infinite regress you can't at a certain point something just emerges out of this mystery that's at your back you know as a matter of consciousness and we know as a matter of causality that it pushes all the way back to again your genome and every prior influence so at what point can you claim to be responsible for all of that and um when you pay attention to what it's like to be you you can notice that you don't even feel responsible for it in some sense you're always in the presence of a mystery now that's not to say that it doesn't matter what you do and what you decide and what kind of person you are I mean like it's not like everyone gets gets off the hook by reason of insanity it's like it's it's still possible to be ethical versus unethical and to be compassionate versus you know malignantly selfish I mean all of these differences matter because they have very different consequences in the world and they and they link up to very different kinds of minds and motivations and um so but at bottom it an insight into the illusoryness of Free Will does change a few things ethically and one thing it it changes is the the basis for hating other people really does go away because on some level you begin to view people as more analogous to forces of nature or as you know wild animals or malfunctioning robots I mean people who are behaving badly on some level are are doing precisely the only thing they could do in that moment and the idea that they could have done otherwise or should have done otherwise it's not that it is totally inadmissible but but when you when you begin saying you should have done otherwise you could have done otherwise what you're really admonishing a person to about is not the past but the future I mean you're trying to insofar as a person can be changed by by your criticism and your argument and your reaction to their misbehavior the reason to react in that way and to and to feel the validity of reacting in that way is to change them for the future you can't go back into the past and and change what they did so if you're into and so and this is very clear with you know you know raising kids like you want kids to grow up to be honest compassionate well integrated members of society so yeah they don't start out that way and so you have to keep saying okay you shouldn't you shouldn't have done that next time do this but you're not you're not imagining that each stage along the way that they could really be different than they were at that stage and ultimately that's true for even you know look at quintessentially you know evil uh adults right like you're just you know the just the the must the mustache twirling psychopath who's you know who murdered lots of people because he likes to murder people well okay you still want to put that person in prison because you want to keep everyone safe from him but you have to recognize that on some level once you get rid of the illusion of free will you recognize that that person is some is basically analogous to you know a great white shark or a grizzly bear or a tiger or any other you know system that is intrinsically dangerous to be close to yeah like that's just there's this he's not available to argument he's he's basically he's just he's fundamentally incorrigible just as a tiger would be you know a wild tiger would be um so it doesn't mean you can't try to avoid that person put that person in prison find a cure for that person if we ever get a cure for psychopathy we would we would use that but it's not that it doesn't mean it's not a problem but it's not a free it's not a problem of Free Will being misused right like no one picked their even if you think people have souls right like no one picked their soul no there's no psychopath walking around with a psychopathic soul Who's responsible for having made his soul Psychopathic it's like he's he's unlucky he got a bad Soul right if Souls exist if without souls he got bad genes and a bad environment and a bad you know contingent neurology yeah so it creates so much uh compassion on one hand as well because you look at someone like Hitler or uh the mustache twirling sociopath psychopath murderer and if you like you've spoken your book free will you give these examples of you then discovered on the other hand that there was a brain tumor pushing upon someone's amygdala that would completely change how you view them but if it's essentially that all the way down right yeah and you can just without even referencing the Neurology of it just look at the the timeline of somebody in somebody's life it's like you take Hitler okay well Hitler is you know the quintessentially evil person who everyone should just kill right it's like like a sad we we wish that the plots against Hitler trying to assassinate him it actually worked right so and they were they were completely Justified right um but at what point in his life would have what would it have been Justified to kill Hitler I mean killing the 25 year old Hitler before he has done anything especially egregious well you know he's going to become the the 40 year old Hitler who's just awful um yeah you might want to stop that but I mean I think even Louis CK has a joke about this like do you go back and kill Hitler in his crib like like Baby Hitler you're going to kill a bait like you're really gonna kill a baby like it's a baby like now we're talking about a baby okay the truth is Hitler the baby is just unlucky it's like is it it's a baby who's for for whatever reason is going to grow up to be Hitler right but as a baby it's just a baby right so it's it's like the baby is not culpable for becoming the one-year-old who becomes a two-year-old who becomes a three-year-old who like at what point does the does Hitler become culpable for being Hitler I don't think he does that now that doesn't mean you don't kill Hitler at a certain like if there's nothing else to do you know if you can't lock him up I am completely in favor of killing Hitler at a certain point now which day you pick in his life is is a judgment call but um it's uh at no point did he make himself and that's true of everybody else that was that was great and the last line in your book uh on Free Will you say that you are not in control of the storm you are not lost in it you are the storm and I think that's a beautiful note to wrap up the Free Will topic there you know last last little thing you've shared that on one level you can't go wrong if you live a life motivated by love and guided by reason I'd love for you to share a little bit about that in your kind of final notes Here your vision for what an awakened Humanity looks like because uh I see you as somebody that has such a profound and deep understanding of The Human Condition and yet we find ourselves in a time with a lot of problems that can be solved and freedom to be discovered on an individual and Collective level what is your vision for an awakened humanity and uh we're up there yeah I think I would add one piece I'm not sure it's I think maybe you can get everything out of love and and reason um but there's one piece that I I would add that um does a lot of work that seems at least conceptually separable and and that's gratitude I think there's something about gratitude that that heals so much that's wrong with us personally psychologically it's like it's um I mean so if you push if you push far enough in the direction of gratitude it there's so many psychological and ethical errors you can no longer make right like it it it almost contains everything we mean by love as well um but I mean just you just recognize that you mean right for virtually anyone I mean unless you're literally the the least lucky person who's ever lived there's just so much to be grateful for I mean it's just like it's just there's so much that is good about even a a very ordinary conflicted difficult life when you compare it to to everything else that is possible Right um and this is where like the philosophy of stoicism is so useful to so many people I mean the stoics often you recommend a a reflection of just this sort of you just think about all the terrible things that haven't happened to you right and that have happened to somebody else right now right and just there are people who would consider all of their prayers answered if they could just trade places with you right now even when you're in the midst of something that you consider to be genuinely difficult right you've got some problem that really is get capturing 100 of your attention it's like it's still so much better than so many so much of what's possible and on that when you recognize that when you be when you the more more you can see your life in those terms kindness and compassion almost by definition fall out of that it's like you just you that's synonymous with having compassion for all the people who and all the you know beyond people all the people and and conscious beings that that have it so much worse than you have it right and through through just pure luck right I mean it's just it is just it's unearned on some level right um and it's on that basis that you just you want to be kind to people because you just don't know one unit in in some sense first of all you know you know everyone's gonna die you know everyone's gonna lose everything they love and everyone close to them right like no matter how it's like we're all United in this in this circumstance of of fundamental impermanence and and fragility um so I don't know it's like we're all moving through life where you know most of us I mean certainly anyone who has the free attention to to listen to a conversation like this and find any of this interesting you know that's almost synonymous with having escaped some of the worst you know variants of suffering on offer at least for a significant period of time and you know so we're all just it's like it's like it's like the class it's like wait the sun is continually coming out from behind the clouds and we're getting we're we're enjoying this this moment in of sunlight and then it goes behind the clouds again and there's lots to struggle through and then we get these moments of sunlight and it's just it's we should be so grateful for for these moments and um for all that we have and all that we don't have to to suffer and uh the only thing that is safeguarding the this project collectively that that ensures that even the luckiest Among Us can cooperate with one another and collaborate in an open-ended way and build you know and make the future look better than the past the all really the only tool Beyond just the Good Will that wants to wants that project to succeed you know the love and and kindness and gratitude that that would grease those gears is reason I mean we just all we have is a disposition to talk about facts to care about facts to be consistent to be self-aware of our own ignorance and our own capacity for self-deception and wishful thinking and cognitive bias to to meet other people I mean we've got we've got this circumstance we've got eight billion strangers you know more virtually everyone is no matter how many people you know virtually everyone is a stranger and all you can do is reason with them from a from a basic inclination to cooperate and find some you know future that's compatible with with more and more of us more of the time leading better lives right and so it's like either we're going to recognize that we're all in principle on the same team in the limit and um try to solve some you know increasingly complex coordination problems and build the tools to do that and or we're going to fail spectacularly at the attempt to do that and our failure will it means it's totally predictable our failure will be born of of failures of rationality and failures of of um Goodwill right I mean failures of Love failures of of um kindness failures of of to act in our what really is in our own best interests if we could only see it I mean the idea that that we could ever wind up in a condition that is permanently Zero Sum it's just it's just a crazy illusion given the circumstance we're actually in I mean given how given how good life could be if we just got our heads screwed on straight and cooperated without political division and dogmatism and you know all of these other all these structures that reliably cause conversations to fail you know I mean it's just um it it really doesn't seem wrong to expect something like a Utopia if we could only get over our very you know basic uh political and apish yeah you know disinclinations to cooperate with one another but reason is the Israel is the only tool for the job because it's the only algorithm you can run where even if people don't like each other and are emotionally unavailable they're resisting uh playing well with others reason because of its Universal characteristics because you can show people you can show your enemies that they're not even that they're being that they're contradicting themselves right it has a capacity to force convergence and really drag drag people kicking and screaming to in across the finish line of cooperation because at bottom reality has a certain structure I mean things that certain things are true and certain things are false and the certain Maps fit the territory better than other maps and we all even if we are confused about in the game we're playing people tend not to like to bump into hard objects in the dark right I mean they want to know where they're going and so the insofar there is in so far as their right answers to any questions of importance reason is the thing that will ensure are that we're tracking that and so um yeah apart from people who are completely psychotic or and are completely Psychopathic it's just these are just fundamentally unavailable to any kind of you know Cooperative effort you know reason is the thing that is going to you know even in the absence of of appropriate love and and good feeling is going to align all of our interests and and so we just um yeah I mean on some level it's the only game in town for strangers to play just what you shared about how a reason really being the modality in which we can find ourselves to solutions that are necessary in this time right but without like empathy and gratitude without reason has no guide and reason without apathy or gratitude is not alive it's not fully alive and this talk and how we would walk in this dance throughout this whole conversation and much of the work that you do of this integrating rational thinking with the spiritual dimensions of life to catch up to a 21st century Viewpoint I think is so needed and I really see you as a Pioneer so as we're speaking about gratitude I just want to share some and say thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing yourself in this way it's been so fulfilling for me I'm just as much of a joyful participant and listener to this conversation as I am uh you know stewarding it with you so just thank you so much and I'm really looking forward to how this conversation evolves news nice well great to be here great to meet you and uh keep it up thank you so much and for everybody that's been tuning in I have found the waking up app extremely profound and Powerful I spent hours and hours on walks listening to different theories and talks and they have amazing meditation so I'll leave a link in the description below where you can find that and check that out if you haven't already they have a free trial it's it's amazing highly highly recommend it everywhere you can find Sam will be linked in the description as well below and is there anything else you want to share before we wrap up uh I don't think so no you can find me in fewer and fewer places now it's just a notice that yeah it's really just um I guess samharris.org and wakingup.com those are the two points of contact so amazing thank you so much uh looking forward to maybe running it back one day and for everybody that's been tuning into this episode of the know they self podcast thank you for coming on this journey with us and until next time and be well [Music] thank you

Channel: André Duqum

Views: 751,400

Keywords: know thyself, podcast, spirituality, personal growth, transformation, andre duqum, interviews, philosophy

Id: gqA-ZRpl1jQ

Length: 161min 17sec (9677 seconds)

Published: Tue May 23 2023