How to Instantly Achieve a Calm State | Sam Harris on Impact Theory

if you're feeling anxiety there's actually a place from which you can just feel it right and and be actually indifferent to it or anything else you could be feeling my first you can know is that anxiety isn't even that unpleasant it's so close to excitement in its actual physiology there really the difference between excitement and anxiety is more or less just that the framing it's just the story you're telling yourself you know if you felt these these tingles and this you know is slightly a gentle eyes response right before you know you're about to go on a roller coaster that's part of why you're going on the roller coaster you like that experience right but the fact that you feel that way when you're about to have an interview or you're about to you know walk out on stage that's intolerable right so just dropping back and realizing the the power of the framing it has immense utility because then you can realize that the the half-life of negative emotions is incredibly short [Music] this episode is brought to you by our friends at audible enjoy everybody welcome to impact Theory our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams alright today's guest is a neuroscientist philosopher and a five-time New York Times bestselling author his book the end of faith won the 2005 pen Award for nonfiction and spent an astonishing 33 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list he is a degree in philosophy from Stanford a PhD in neuroscience and he's practiced meditation for more than 30 years a combination that gives him a very unique perspective that has made him one of the most sought-after thinkers on the planet he's given multiple TED talks with millions of views and his written works have been translated into more than 20 different languages additionally he's written for some of the most prestigious publications around including the New York Times the Los Angeles Times and the annals of Neurology to name but a few a clear and rational voice almost without peer on some of today's most difficult subjects when he speaks thousands of people show up in real life and millions listen online and his ideas have been discussed by some of the most visible and well respected outlets in the world including time the New York Times Scientific American Nature and countless others he's also the host of the webby award-winning podcast making sense which was named by Apple as one of the iTunes best so please help me in welcoming the man who has spent roughly two years an aggregated silent contemplation one of the Four Horsemen of the non apocalypse Sam Harris [Applause] welcome thank you absolute pleasure to have you yeah pleasure to be here I am really excited to dive into the some of these subjects which I think you have just such a fascinating take on and the thing that I've drawn the most wisdom from with you is what and and these are very much my words how to live a good life and that's where I want to start and it'd be really interesting to hear your definition of like what kind of life and way of thinking should we be aiming for yeah it was a hard question because I my notion of human well-being is really open-ended I don't think we understand what the horizon is if in fact there is one for kind of ultimate flourishing of conscious Minds we have a pretty good sense of what we don't want and are right not to want we don't want to be terrorized and depressed and find ourselves constantly in conflict with strangers finding our aims frustrated so we'll admit that the generic situation we want to find ourselves in more and more is to effortlessly cooperate with creative and happy strangers right I mean that where there's 7 billion of us we need institutions and laws and norms and ways of thinking that take the friction out of pleasurable and non paranoid interaction with strangers omits not just about having you know five or so close friends who's got who have your back right I mean you like clearly we're all on the same team on some basic level and if we can't figure out how to build a civilization where everyone thrives to some degree we'll have the world we currently have until it becomes unsustainable and because we're in a situation now where I think it's reasonable to worry that our default state of partisanship and tribalism and rational fear of the incompatible aims of you know other groups and other people is unsustainable in the presence of more and more destructive technology I just think I think we have to get our act together psychologically and socially in a way that we haven't and when you think about that coming down to the personal level do you think about people as having a North Star or a purpose that they should be pursuing and to contextualize that I'll say because I always found myself wanting to ask people that I ended up answering the question for myself and so for me the purpose of my life from my perspective is to see how much of my potential I can actuate so how how many skills can i acquire that have meaning and utility to me that allow me to serve not only myself but others and so that sense of pushing myself to always get better to always improve to show up every day and not think about whether I get something across some finish line generate a certain amount of wealth or anything like that but just do I sincerely approach the idea of bettering myself in a very specific direction based on what I want to accomplish in my life or not and if I do that sincerely then I say that the day or the life has been a victory and if I don't do that then to me I'm pointed in the wrong direction do you have any sort of guiding light like that that say you would try to pass on to your children or that you yourself have for you well I think that's a good one and I share it but I can imagine other versions of having a name which don't really totally overlap with that it may say you know would be you know someone could decide for instance that they have a talent that is highly marketable and what they want to do is make as much money as possible so that they can give a lot of it away to help people I mean money money is is just energy right it just you know if you are making billions of dollars and you're giving billions of dollars away to good causes well that you know on an effective altruism metric that's that's much better than you going to Africa yourself and handing out food you know in a famine right you want to be bankrolling thousands of people to do that right and if you have a skill you know if you're a great singer or whatever and and it may be some skill that you didn't spend a lot of time to acquire right so you you know you don't have this whole map 3-story that you have and that actually resonates with me so that that would be a good life you know provided you can extract the psychological satisfaction from it because most of what we experience in philanthropy is when it when it's telescopic in this way when you're just signing a check you're not necessarily connected to the good you're doing and I could imagine someone doing immense good in the world by signing very large checks but not actually internalizing the gratification of that on some level we have to be aware of the possibility of rowing and to boat simultaneously there's what the effects are in the world of how we're living so you know we want to have a good impact on others but we actually want our conscious States of psychological pain and pleasure to be mapped in some rational way to the kinds of effects we're having right so you don't want to be a callous person who's just leaving devastated and unhappy people in your wake and taking pleasure in that I mean that you're a psychopath that that's that's how you're tuned but you also don't want to be a person who's doing a lot of good in the world but not able to internalize the felt sense of your connectedness to others because you're you know you're too neurotic or you're too distracted or you're just not you know connecting with others so it's really interesting and I don't think I've ever heard anybody else talk about that notion of making sure that you're mapping what you're doing to sort of be outwardly altruistic to actually map to your own internal state of well-being if you will and hearing the discussions that you've been around Islam and how beliefs and ideas can be really dangerous made me ask a question of how and basically I'll quickly summarize so you've got people that they have a book and the book has ideas and things that they are meant to believe and then act in accordance with and because of where they grew up or you know what their parents and the society around them taught them they internalize those beliefs and if we could through communicating our ideas well to them get them to see something that caused more well-being for other people that that would be a better way to move their belief system so one do you believe that a belief system is malleable in that there's some element of what you could choose this set of ideology or you could choose this and I don't know if you would say that one of those is more true than the other but certainly one may take us closer to well-being than the other and if you think that belief systems are by their very nature malleable things what would sort of be the belief system in just like a couple tenants that you could hand to somebody that you think would help them maximize their own well-being as well as serve a greater good speaking generically I think having our beliefs map onto reality to some degree is obviously good because if they're not you're just bumping into hard objects it's like if your map is completely wrong you are bound to suffer right so we have to be in a situation where radical ignorance can't people is right so that's that's one principle now there could be a looseness of fit that there could be situations where being strictly right about what's true you may be non optimal right there may be it may be useful to have a slightly delusional self-serving bias right they think you're coming off better than you are like it may give you more enthusiasm for your life and more confidence but anything that's to out of register is just illusion right and other people notice and other people treat you like somebody who's just not tracking in a reality and so that's one principle so I think we want our beliefs to be true in some basic sense and therefore we want to be open to new evidence and better arguments perpetually right because if you're if you closed yourself off if you say well listen I'm done I'm done thinking about reality and I know what's true then again mourn when more data comes in you know when something surprising when one of your intuitions proves to be faulty if you can't error correct again you're just going to fall out of alignment with what's going on in the world and what with what other people think is true as well so the really the only mechanism we have to do that is human conversation we have to be open to having other people point out errors in our and we had you know in the conversation we have with ourselves we have to do like what we have to be continually open to the possibility that we might be wrong and in fact we're very likely to be wrong a lot of the time and so then you know then hence the virtue of getting educated and surrounding yourself with smart people and reading good books and just exposing yourself to the kinds of lessons that other people have learned over up you know thousands of years and are learning in real time right now and you can live vicariously through you don't have to make all the errors that everyone is made around you so you don't have to it's like you can look at Lance Armstrong and say okay well it's probably not a good idea to lie you know relentlessly about something and then try to punish the people who caught you in your lives and then get caught and have to wind up on Oprah apologizing right I mean that's you know you can you can internalize that lesson and understand something about that the ethics and reputational cost of lying so given that given the conversation and an openness to the intrusions of other people's thinking is really the best game in town for understanding what reality is and how to navigate within it then you can see how non-optimal and you know ultimately dangerous dogmatism is dogmatism is just holding to an idea no matter what else comes into view right so there's nothing you can say to challenge the I'm so you know I'll talk to you about all this stuff but over here there's something that I care about some proposition you know some assertion that something is true that I care about so much I'm so emotionally attached to it that not only is it non-negotiable if you continue to push over here I'm gonna get angrier and angrier right I'm gonna I'm gonna threaten you with violence right that is the default state of organized religion right historically and they say you know certain religions now have kind of relaxed their intolerance to a degree where the violence isn't explicit but that is the not only is that the default a faith-based religion they have a way of thinking about Dogma dogmatism is a good word in the context of religion or make Christian dogma is not is not a derogatory term they call it dogma for a reason right okay certainly can't the Catholics do so the this notion that you can believe something strongly without evidence or certainly without good evidence without evidence that can survive pressure from outside so the idea that wanting evidence is a perversion of your circumstance right so like that you know you really if you if you buy this thing in the bag that you keep that I haven't shown you you are that redounds to your credit right it's just one it's not true because the experiential core of these religions and the experiences like unconditional love say those can be experienced I mean it's not that everything in our religious literature's is untrue but there's nothing that has to be believed on insufficient evidence to be explored and so what I recommend here is that we really adopt a scientific attitude every word we don't partition our thinking about reality where we say well here's the stuff over here we're super important but we can't think about it too rigorously right - in fact I think about it too rigorously is to corrupt it and then over here we've got you know science and technology and you know engineers to calculate and whether a bridge is gonna you know withstand the weight of the traffic on it and there we can think rigorously so do you know don't tell me about rigor with respect to meaning and you know what what's worth living for and what's worth dying for and you know well you what is love and compassion and well-being like that's all that has to be just we have to be hostage to a conversation that our ancestors were having 2,000 years ago and we have to imagine that certain of our books were dictated by the creator of the universe to organize all that but over here let's get let's get it all dialed in because we really care about how our smartphones work right it makes it makes no sense it's trying to try to resolve that tension is something I've spent a lot of time on it's it's interesting to me that that tension exists and it makes me come back to ok why doesn't that tension exist in my own life and the organizing principle that I use and I think a lot about like what would somebody pass on to their children now I've decided not to have kids so I will never get to answer but I spent a lot of time thinking about what are the organizing principles you've referred to ideas as sort of the operating system of the mind and that seems very apt to me so what are the organizing principles that I would give somebody to think in a certain way and one of the things I'm obsessed with and I think I explained this so poorly I don't see it light people's eyes up and I'd love to figure out how to say it well which is this skills have utility now what I mean by that is learning architecture is interesting because it allows you to build a structure that could protect somebody allows you to build a structure that to really make it basic like the one I forget exactly what country it's in but the seed vault right like you understand architecture well enough and how to ventilate things and all the things that seeds would need to like live for a very long time so we could replant if we had to learning those skills had a purpose and that purpose allows for something to happen and so let's take Brazilian Jujitsu which I know that you do jiu-jitsu everything that you learn in jiu-jitsu has a real-world implication and that real-world implication is one if you got into a fight you probably be more likely to be able to successfully defend yourself and that in and of itself is is so profound as to be worth the time now there's obviously all kinds of other benefits as well but once people understand ok these skills have utility then I need to be fiendish about increasing my skill set because it has this real-world application so the problem that I get into where people are dogmatic about anything whether it's religion or like I wrote this belief system Caves the 25 things that I had to do to my mind in order to go from being a good employee which I always lovingly referred to as sort of a slave like mentality I kept my head down did as little work as possible and avoided punishment at all costs that's where I started that's what my parents taught me to do and to get out of that and to become an entrepreneur there were these very simple write down Abul things that I had to choose to believe in act in accordance with and if you came to me and said hey Tom by the way number 14 on your list doesn't make sense and it doesn't make sense for this reason I think you misunderstood something about your own journey I'd be like that's so rad because now you're giving me something that has more utility than the thing that I've used thus far one what why do you think that breaks down what is it that people value more than that is there some internal thing and then what process can people use to become more aware of what's guiding their decision-making because I think a lot of people I don't know if it's just at a feeling level it's like a limbic thing or what well I think it's a framing problem because most of what people care about can be thought of as a skill right I mean well-being is a skill not suffering unnecessarily is a skill regulating noticing your emotional life and regulate a negative emotion is a skill so you know I have a meditation app and you know meditation as a skill it was a very useful one and I'm spending a lot of time teaching you what's now referred to as mindfulness meditation and the moment you begin practicing mindfulness which is just just learning to pay close attention to the nature of your experience you're not adding anything to your experience you're just noticing what it's like to be you a moment a moment but in a way that is not reactive you're not grasping at what's pleasant or pushing what's unpleasant away you're just I mean to me to make this concrete I mean let's say you have a fear of public speaking right so you've got to go down out on a stage and you feel anxiety the the usual the default state of someone who doesn't want to have that experience it's just trying to figure is one to you know in advance to worry about that experience I mean the anxiety is kindled just by the mere thought of what you have to do then once you feel the butterflies you are at war with them right you can't wrap your mind contracts around it your conversation with yourself is is an unhappy one it's like why the am I this person who just can't like I see people do this all the time they're they're relaxed I'm unhappy you know when am i and you're talking to yourself you're not noticing it because you're the thoughts just come up from behind you as fast as they can and they seem to be you right you're identified with each thought that emerges in consciousness and most people live their lives as though there's no alternative we're not given a rulebook for how to operate a human mind right and there's no place in a normal education where we're what's even indicated that there's an alternative here and so we get we kind of stumble out into adulthood more or less assuming that we have will always have the minds we have and that really there's you know we the only thing we can do to really upgrade our firmware is to just add new content you know we can read books we can we can develop interests but there's nothing at the sort of root level of our emotional and cognitive life that can change and so mindfulness is a way of kind of dropping a little bit lower and realizing so in this case if you're feeling anxiety there's actually a place from which you can just feel it right and and be actually indifferent to it or anything else you could be feeling they just just notice that there's even an unpleasant sensation my first even knows that anxiety isn't even that unpleasant it means it's so close to excitement in its actual physiology there really the difference between excitement and anxiety is more or less just that the framing it's just the story you're telling yourself you know if you felt these these tingles and this you know is slightly a gentle eyes response right before you know you're about to go on a roller coaster that's part of why you're going on the roller coaster you like that experience right but the fact that you feel that way when you're about to have an interview or you're about to walk out on stage that's intolerable right so just dropping back and realizing the the power of the framing is again this is a skill that is fairly esoteric one but now you know many people are learning it you know the secret's out and it has immense utility because then you can realize that the the half-life of negative emotions is incredibly short may one you could you can actually be psychologically free even in their presence right your freedom and your well-being isn't even predicated on getting rid of the physiology right like it you can still be there but if you're not continually thinking about all the reasons why you should be anxious the physiology dissipates very very quickly and that's true for anger it's true for anything that that is classically negative and so to come back to your question but you know many of the things that people think they want out of life they either think are or many or many of the the the ways they're keeping score about how good their lives are or aren't they're not seen as these are either you know this experience is being delivered to them either based on the skills they have or the skills they've never thought to acquire right and yeah so that's that's one thing I would add to the picture of the the usefulness of skills I want to talk about the emotional control that you bring up I think that's super powerful when my wife and I were first married my problem was I have a very slow fuse or very long fuse and so it takes a lot to get me angry and that was actually a big complaint of hers should be really annoyed something would happen someone cut in front of us in line and I wouldn't freak out and she wanted me to freak out and she wanted me to like just bask in how unjust it was and she would really lament that and it just seems so strange to me but then when I got mad I would stay mad and there were times I would stay mad eight ten twelve hours and I was working so much at the beginning of our relationship the only time that we really had together as husband and wife would be for part of a Saturday and I would inevitably she would say something it would upset me I would get pissed and I would stay pissed the entire time but then as you said once you stopped reinforcing it which I would do unfortunately I'd be reinforcing reinforcing reinforcing it then something would happen it would change my neural chemistry I'd forget like why was I so mad every single time I was like why did I just waste that time being mad so I end up writing myself this letter and I gave it to my wife and I said read that to me the next time I get pissed off and in the letter I said hey me it's me I have no hidden agenda here as to why I want you to calm down other than the fact that you know that if you end up being pissed for several hours you're gonna regret it every single time and right now I want you to laugh out loud and for however long it takes just laugh out loud you know studies show that you can't laugh out loud and remain pissed and so I gave it to her I got pissed she read I only had to read it once it was so profoundly transformational to see that just by laughing out loud I couldn't stay angry that it really helped me get control of my emotions so that I knew I can do what all call a state shift I don't think I've ever heard you use that kind of language but if I'm angry I'm choosing to stay angry yeah unfortunately I hadn't found meditation at that point so I had to sort of brute force my way to that what can people do to learn to get control of their emotions well the first thing to realize is that they already have control they could virtually anyone watching this I would expect can do this under certain circumstances so though the one example I would have you recall is I'm sure that has happened to almost everyone you're in some state like that you're you're angry you've just gotten triggered by something but then the phone rings right and the thought is you're getting called by somebody who this is not someone for you to process your anger would this is like a business call or like you have to function right and it actually perfectly interrupts your state you actually can just reset and have the conversation and the physiology is dissipated in very very quickly there your attention is on something else and you're just having to function now of course if somebody if it's a friend or your mother or somebody who you can complain to well then you'll jump on and you'll you'll amplify this state because you'll have a reason to talk about it so you you can interrupt these states and simply put your attention on something else and and then you know and then it dissipates one thing that I'm really curious to know you seem just freakishly educated on a whole lot of topics what is your process for learning how do you go about in taking data how do you start do you pull threads what thread do you pull first if you do like how do you really begin to educate yourself on any given topic well I don't really have I mean I take in a lot of information and I always have so that's you know and not in necessarily an efficient or smart way I don't I don't have you know life hacks that that optimize me as a a consumer of information so you're like you know I know there are ways that are recommended to read a book so as to extract the the you know the the actionable information as quickly as possible from it I have never been an adopter of any of those ways so like you know and I mean we're still I basically read everything at the same speed so like I read everything like it's Scripture so if it's you know you know People magazine in a waiting room of a dentist's office I'm reading that at the same speed that I'm reading you know a work of philosophy or neuroscience and the big change of late I mean the you know I guess this probably happened somewhere around ten years ago is that once I realized that there's functionally an infinite amount of information to consume its doubling you know the science has every three to five years and you know there are literally thousands of good books that I will wish I had read but I will never get around to reading I've become a very fickle reader in the sense that I you know I've cut my losses very early the sunk cost fallacy has completely disappeared for me the idea that I've you know spent five hours or five days on this thing so I better just finish it right that used to be my orientation with respect to reading books now I'll discard a book you know just on a whim because I know there's a infinite amount of stuff I want to read you know I don't go into the table of contents and look at the structure of the book and then go to the index and then look at the topics and then pay yeah I mean I just start on page one and start reading and then when I get bored I stop you know and so that's you know and do it do with what do with that life hack what you will but I do continually I mean I'm either listening to audiobooks or podcasts or the news when I'm working out or commuting or or you know I'm just you know constantly taking in information you know fairly passively when I'm multitasking so there's not you know that I mean the one thing that that I don't have a lot of in my life is music because I you know I can't write to music certainly not music with lyrics I can't podcast to music obviously and I've decided that there's so much that I'm interested in there's so much that I want to know that basically I just hear music by accident now yeah just like someone else is playing music if I walk into a store there's music associated with the film it's getting in but otherwise I'm just you know I'm fire hose of information pointed at my head most of the time I get that so despite the perchance haphazard way that you're reading it does seem at least from the outside that you are striving I would say pretty truly for excellence help me reconcile so one of the things I struggled with with meditation was it felt decidedly feminine and in a way that as somebody who I felt I felt that certainly growing up that I was far more on the feminine end of being a guy than anything else and so for me my journey certainly to being an entrepreneur was one of toughening up and so anything that that made me sort of feel that old-school sort of gentle way I would push back on and it's why I didn't meditate for a long time but I see you're doing Brazilian Jujitsu you're somebody who obviously cares about martial arts and being able to fight and defend yourself I've heard you talk very eloquently about violence and clearly in your professional life you've just even just what you've done in the writing let alone the lecturing you've already achieved such massive success refused to believe that there wasn't a just massive amount of energy behind that so how do you think about meditation in that context is this like going to war with your mind and your I'm going to come out the other side having faced demons and having won some sort of victory that allows me to perform at a higher level or am I totally missing all of this and it needs to be a letting go a more peaceful relaxed sort of transient experience yeah well first it's a very common Association I totally understand it and it's presented in many ways where yeah you under that framing you can just feel the testosterone leaving your body yeah yeah you know so yeah that's not my orientation it is a lot like jujitsu for the mind and it's and it's a lot like it but what's so beautiful about jujitsu in particular is that you can have this massive effect in the domain of violence while being relaxed it is what Aikido of you know advertises itself to be but it's a much more you know at least in my estimation a much more effective version of that same underlying ethic where you can like you can control someone and use as a little violence as as necessary and basically just use a superior knowledge of physics and leverage and position against them so it's it's a very it can be incredibly relaxed and yet given what the circumstance is it can be a very high testosterone experience you know it's not so kind of quintessentially masculine thing to be doing but you can internalize the same sort of structure and that's largely what meditation is because it would be basically the default state is one of being attacked and ambushed all the time by your thoughts and by your reactivity and by you are being taken in by assumptions and and illusions and not know yet just you just you you're in a fog not you personally but you know one is and you know even when you learn to meditate you're in this fog most of the time I mean the answer your kite is so the practice is one of continually breaking the spell you were constantly on the mat constantly finding yourself in a position of some surprising disadvantage right like it's like all of a sudden there's a rear naked choke okay that's you know three-quarters applied right and you need an answer for that and not knowing the answer it's just synonymous with death right it's like you're just getting you know you're just you'll be as miserable for as long as as circumstances dictate in the absence of that and and I shudder to interrupt this because I found it so interesting tying it to BJJ but I need to know why is it or I want it said why is it that the identification with the eye or the these never-ending thoughts why do they create suffering well it's just the ego is at bottom it is itself a kind of contraction I mean when you look at what you you're this feeling of self is right so mid let's just talk about what the the sense of self is the sense of self for most of us is not a feeling that were identical with our bodies but most people don't feel like dental with their physical bodies they feel like they're passengers inside their bodies right they thought like my body's down here like these are my hands these are my legs you know I obviously care about these things you know if you know I you know this is these were my pains and pleasures are coming from but I'm up here in the head and I'm a kind of passenger I'm a witness of this and if you look I mean most people when they try to pay attention they try to find themselves they try to you know they they try to meditate they feel that they are a locus of attention in the head behind their face behind their eyes you know looking out at the world and the world is not self you know you or you're over there I'm looking across space at you I'm here behind my face and my face is a kind of mask really I mean it's like I'm not I'm not identical to my face I mean I it's it's states matter to me like if I have some weird expression on my face you know like someone sit like can we take a picture of you and you can't figure out how to smile and you feel uptight like you're reading the state of your face as even your emotions are playing on your on your face right the signature of the emotion you're feeling it has a lot to do with what you feel in your face and it feeds back into your mind or if you force yourself to smile you you can you actually feel a date of happiness coming in your in your mind but people feel like they're behind their face in their head right and so that you know kind of homunculus that that that person in the head which we know doesn't make any sense neurologically there's no place in the brain where they could feel a little you know consciousness that is one thing that is this stable self that's looking out through the eyes right there's a flow of experience and you know it's it is invoking you know many regions of the brain at all times and there is no you you are identical to this flow of experience this the stream of consciousness is what you are as a matter of subjectivity right I'm not I'm not saying that it's not arising in the brain or that bodies aren't real or that there's no physical universe I'm saying as a matter of experience there is just this flow of consciousness and its contents and yet we seem to put this unchanging center to it and that is a the what what that is you know what the what is giving us that feeling that there is an unchanging center to this flow is this sort of this contracted identification with thought it is a kind of thought it is just each moment of you know if I'm saying something and it doesn't make sense or it sounds like that part of it that part that the experience in you which says oh that's not right right that feels like you right I mean you're not you're not witnessing it as an object in consciousness just arise and pass away it sort of has come up from behind and it just feels like that's me right and but that thing is always happening that that's me feeling is always happening and so you just feel like you're in your head behind your face right well for two reasons there's two sides of this coin so much of our of what we're thinking is making us miserable right so much of it is unpleasant so much of it is causing anxiety we got you look at your to-do list you got 50 things on it you just feel like oh my oh there's just the day's not long enough right this is you know the state and that's a good you know that's a you know the high-class problem to have right there many you know there are worse problems this is the state we're in and the obverse of that is when we're really just connecting with life in a joyful creative beautiful way like when you look out the window and it's the most beautiful sunset ever and you are just looking at the sunset right you're not yet like you're fully connected with its beauty those are all moments where you're losing this sense of self but the difference between meditation and those moments is that you're not really aware of losing the sense of self in those moments you're not really aware of what is freeing about those moments and you can't do it in other circumstances like you can't like you know I need that I need the beautiful sunset just looking at your shoe isn't it good enough for me right but with meditation I can actually look at your shoe in the same way that I look at the sunset all right so that's the like what's what's what's happening for people most people is that they're waiting for the world to give them a good enough reason to just be present and to be present so fully that they lose their sense of self right there they're no longer behind their face you know just waiting for something good to happen right or figuring out how to change the experience enough so that again they can start there they're no longer at war and they work to a greater or lesser degree we're always at war and we're always fighting something you know there's always it's like you know you're always noticing something wrong you're feeling uncomfortable in your body you're reacting to something that somebody did or you thought they did you're navigating a social encounter that seems off kilter you know it's awkward and like you're trying to figure out some what to say and that would that sounded stupid and like you're you're you just being blown around and the moments where you really feel good or moments where you can you or that there isn't a coming to rest right where it's not about the past or future you know it's not even about it's not about half a second ago it's not about half a second from now and the ultimate version of that is to jut entails the dropping of this this sense of self is everything you do about flourishing for you unfortunately not I mean I think that you know the wisdom would be really being able to track what is gonna matter you know at the end of the day or at the end of a life for me flourishing is a matter of spending your time pleasantly and happily and creatively and having fun but in all the ways which it every moment when someone asks you well you know that last hour that stay that last week that last year do you feel good about that was that a good use of your time that remembering self that retrospective gesture that's where people worry about things like meaning right I mean that's like it so it's Liz to it mean to use you know Danny Kahneman's framing here there's the experiencing self and there's the remembrance self and the remembering self is the self that you're talking to when you say you know are very satisfied with your life whether you're asking yourself or someone's asking you and the answers that are available in the in those moments really determine whether or not somebody has a kind of global life satisfaction whether they have meaning and those are that's the those are the moments where people feel like you know I need religion I need to know I you know I need to know how the the far future is gonna be I need like I need some story to tell myself that is fundamentally consoling but the experiencing self thinks the self that is just going moment to moment feeling pains and pleasure and just dealing with dealing with this view very short you know time horizon I think that is that's fundamentally our real self I mean the the remembrance self is the is a version of that you know if you ask me are you satisfied with your life and I you know spend the next 30 seconds telling you about that that is yet another you know brief chapter in my experiencing self right and most of life is it is a story is is you know is getting a get in summed over this this this lifeline of the experience in self and their questions of meaning and a kind of global story to tell yourself about what this is all about are far less important than people think I math I think you want to be playing both games intelligently you don't want to be absorbed in in pleasures which every time you think about your life have you feeling I'm just wasting my life I'm just you know I'm a superficial guy you know I've you know I got wealthy and now I just do heroin and play golf right and it's just fun you know it like whenever you check in with me I feel pretty good because I have you know an unlimited supply of heroin and golf but it's you know I can't really you know I'm sort of embarrassed by every time I have to talk about it right that that's not the you know you you you do want so over here you'd still do want you want your pleasures to be justified by good relationships and a world that cares about your inputs and outputs right so you're like you want you know you want what you're paying attention to all day long to matter to someone else and we're so deeply social it's not wrong to want those things but again it's possible to have a purchase on well-being that is deeper than any one of those things so that when you lose one of those things right when you find out that the the thing you thought people would love they actually hated right you know the television show you wrote or the novel you wrote or whatever you invested all this time you had a hope for this thing but your hopes were disappointed how long do you suffer over that right the in the absence of and this sort of superpower where you can actually find an intrinsic well-being to consciousness it will be for as long as you know you're you know bad genes and bad life experiences dictate right it's like it's just you're at the mercy of who you were yesterday and so meta you know as a skill meditation is fairly unique in that you can actually reset independent of what's going on but again it's not a reason to become totally immune to your integrate you know the effects you're having on the world and what the world was telling you because ultimately you are gonna spend most of your time asleep and dreaming you know this in this state with you know in conversation with yourself and in conversation with others no matter how much you meditate I mean I you know I think ultimately there are people who get you know quote fully enlightened and completely break the spell of being identified with with thoughts you know I'm not one of those people they're certainly not yet and so I experienced this fluctuation but the deflection the fluctuation is so important for my well-being that I am and I can talk about it without you know hesitation what do you say to people who the deep fundamental problem in their life is that they're lost they have no sense of meaning or purpose they don't know what direction to go into they're sliding towards depression because it all seems so pointless that that's something that I encounter with people a lot people will stop me randomly and just be like help and I'd love to know knowing that you have a very limited window of time with that person you know what would you say in like 60 or 90 seconds that would hopefully send them on a path that would actually be useful well I would just point out the mechanics of it which is what is actually going on is that they're lost and thought they're they're thinking without knowing that they're thinking basically every moment of their waking life right and that and the character of that story in this case is depressing or more you know certainly productive of unhappiness now they're two the three at least three possible antidotes to that and they should try all of them right so like if we're talking about a clinical depression it's it's useful to say that there's a physiology to this that you know can be driven from below in a way that's not narrowly responsive to their thinking right so it's it'll tend to produce depressive thoughts and the depressive thoughts will tend to feedback on the state but you know I don't think all forms of depression are just a matter of what a person is thinking and it can be really it's it's best viewed as the kind of disease you know of physiology and so you know I'm not against antidepressants at all I know many people who've received a lot of help from them and I hope we get better ones in the future and and pharmacology is definitely a piece of the solution for for many people and everything else that is good to do that people sort of lose their commitment to doing at the worst possible time should be done I mean you have to sort of get behind yourself and push to exercise and to socialize and to do things that you know you you may not want to do because those are good for you and help you know break and can break you out of it but the normal range of psychological suffering you know not clinical depression but just feeling like you know life sucks and you're a failure and there's nothing you know it's like you just it's you're stuck that is a story of telling yourself a story you're thinking and you can either become more and more mindful of that and interrupt that more and more and or and it should be and you can reframe this continually and tell yourself a better story right you can actually just engineer you know you can change the code that you're you're you know running moment to moment and I mean just yeah very simple one which I you know I used actually recently recorded this in a lesson on the app you know just gratitude just thinking is actually you know this particular maneuver is I believe comes from stoic philosophy I didn't actually get it from stoic philosophy but this this sort of use of negative imagination where you think of all of the bad things that haven't happened to you right so if you're just you know if you're stuck in traffic drive into the job that you don't like and you're you're frustrated you can think of all the things that could happen to you right that happened and if any one of them happen to you you would consider your prayers answered if you could just be returned to this moment right like you haven't been diagnosed with cancer right you've got two young kids say you know you want to live to see them grow up and you could be the guy who today is gonna find out you've got two months to live right and you have to then the next two months is spent just unwinding your worldly Affairs right you're not that guy right that hasn't happened to you yet that's just more thinking but it can have a found effect you can you can reframe your experience in a way that doesn't actually change anything material about your circumstance and it can let the light in and they're many techniques like that that are just a matter of invoking useful concepts skillfully tell these guys where they can find you online the making sense podcast is something I spent a lot of time doing my meditation app is that waking up calm it's called waking up and otherwise I'm just my website sam harris org i'm on twitter is also sam harris org there's no dot but you just put in sam harris and you'll get an eyeful yes very true what's the impact that you want to have on the world why you know i what i'm spending my time doing is trying to engage honestly with interesting and consequential ideas i mean that's so the net that the the Venn diagram i have you know i don't think about it a lot but when i think about you know retrospectively what i have been spending a lot of time doing i seem to keep finding the intersection of intellectually interesting ideas they have to have some connection to science or philosophy or it just it has to be the kind of thing that someone would may want to think about anyway because they're just cool ideas so something like artificial intelligence right very interesting to think about but it's also hugely consequential you know increasingly so and if we get it wrong it will you know read down to our misery right if not extinction right so like that is that's the the center of the bullseye for me something that's interesting something is consequential something that that getting it the difference between getting it right and wrong is enormous right and that's so that it's those are that's the landscape where i'm trying to continually focus my conversations all right guys truly there are a few people on this planet that have influenced my thinking more than this man i hope that you will dive in his world and let it expand your own consciousness and and discover new things that you're capable of if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be a legendary take care everyone I wanted to take a second to give a shout out to our longtime friends at audible I know you've heard me talk about them a thousand times before but that's because I literally live inaudible it is how I do virtually all of my listening and that's because with audible you can get pretty much any audio book in any genre and listen to it anywhere you are so whether you're at home at the gym on your commute whatever audible is hands-down the most convenient way for me to learn and I think that is true for a lot of people so start listening with an audible membership today and to get started you're gonna get a 30 day free trial you'll receive your first audio book for free and to free audible originals just go to audible.com slash impact Theory or text impact theory to 500 500 when you start I recommend checking out David Goggins book can't hurt me it is one of my recent favorites in fact it's one of my all-time favorites absolutely love that audio book and what he did as a part of the read of that is really extraordinary it's very different I highly encourage you to check it out so if you want to get more reading done this year I urge you guys to do it with audible it's just a phenomenal way to do the reps get amazing information so go to audible.com forward slash impact theory today and start your free trial right now that's audible.com slash I am PA see t th e o ry or you can text impact theory to 500 500 give it a try alright guys joy and be legendary how many times have you robbed a bank I have the bank the way you mean as he went into a woman and stole the cash four times Wow and stole money virtually dozens of times

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 912,043

Rating: 4.8130026 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Sam Harris, Sam Harris and Tom Bilyeu

Id: StzNlYXnCm4

Length: 53min 56sec (3236 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 25 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/graining]

Sam Harris is interviewed by Tom Bilyeu on anxiety, depression and mindfulness. The time-stamps in the description box of the video give a great breakdown of what he talks about throughout the video. It is pretty long, so I've copied and pasted them here if you want to skip right to a specific part (although I highly recommend watching all of it):

SHOW NOTES:

*Sam defines what a good life is, and why we have to get our act together [3:05]

*Sam describes the relationship between philanthropy and psychological good [5:12]

*Sam challenges dogma and advocates open conversation and scientific investigation [8:39]

*Sam and Tom discuss skill acquisition, and how even well-being is a skill [16:03]

*Sam and Tom discuss emotional control [22:34]

*Sam explains that he has no life hacks to optimize learning [26:46]

*Sam describes meditation as jiu-jitsu for the mind [29:56]

*Sam explains why ego and never-ending thoughts cause suffering [33:49]

*Sam describes what a flourishing life would be [40:11]

*Sam talks about what to do if you are just completely lost [45:27]

*Sam shares the impact he would like to have on the world [50:24]

[u/TheTipsyNurse1]

Ooh thank you. I might have missed this otherwise. If Sam can't help me to achieve a calm state then noone can!

[u/ttbme]

Lighting is so bad in that studio. Sam looks like the crypt keeper.

[u/hkedik]

Haven’t come across this before, thanks for posting!

[u/Intellectual_Swami]

The interviewer has some off putting mannerisms, but otherwise good stuff

[u/frenchbenefits]

Thanks for the link. Never heard of this podcast. I wish this was what the last Sam Harris live event was like.

[u/giuliettazoccola]

To end the calm state just say "Glenn Greenwald" once and all your thin-skinned rage returns instantly.

[u/philsmock]

TL;DW anyone?

[u/[deleted]]

Sam Harris is a moron