Joe Rogan asks Sam Harris & Dan Harris about Mediation

hello freak [ __ ] now I want to switch gears a little bit it's not totally related but it is and somewhat and in some ways headspace talking about mindsets and talking about like we've brought this up but really haven't delved into it much at all about meditation and about how much it's affected you and how it got you back on track and I know that you're a big proponent of it and I am as well although I think I'd probably do it differently than you guys do but I'd love to hear how you do it I use an isolation tank no really like again three deprivation - yeah yeah and I do a lot of yoga those are those are two big ones for me you know I think those alone have straightened out my brain in a great way yoga in particular yoga because it's um it's not Yoga forces you to do it you know like if you're either doing it or you're not doing it that there's no room for distraction you know you're you're essentially forced to deal with what these poses require of you and I think that in doing so and having a singular focus of trying to maintain your balance and stretch and extend and do all these different things while you do then concentrating almost entirely on your breath which is a big factor in yoga that it's a it has remarkable brain scrubbing attributes yeah I would say and I don't know much wood before I say this let me just ask what are you doing in the isolation tank like what are you in your mind I'll let the bull you know do use it for a bunch of different in a bunch of different ways I don't use it as much as I should honestly but I concentrate on sometimes I go in there with an idea like I'll concentrate on material like that I'm working on or maybe jujitsu techniques I'm having problems with or some other things I'm dealing with you know any any sort of issues that I have sometimes I do that sometimes it just go in there and chill out and relax and breathe and concentrate there's a lot of physical things that happen inside the tank is the amount of magnesium that's in the water because it's Epsom salts it's really good for you physically it's very good for the muscles it loosens you up and relaxes you and that eliminates a lot of stress and that physical elimination of stress allows the brain to function with just less prayer allows you to relax more put things in perspective better and it also it gives you this environment that's not available anywhere else on the planet this weightless floating you know disconnected from your body environment where you're you don't hear anything you don't see anything you know feeling thing you feel like you're weightless you you you have this sensation of flying because you're totally weightless weightless in the dark you open your eyes you don't see anything you close your eyes is exactly the same the water is the same temperature as your skin so you don't feel the water and you're floating I'll say this I don't know share this is going to go down I actually don't have any questions about the benefits of being an isolation tank even though I don't know too much about it and I also am I think Yoga is great although I don't do much of it myself I I think though that there may actually be a difference between those two activities and meditation mmm because this is a kind of this is a highfalutin term metacognition sort of knowing what you know or knowing that you're thinking that happens in the kind of mindfulness meditation of which Sam and I are proponents proponents that I think is a different thing where you're seeing and I'll just try to put this in English when you're meditating the way we do you're seeing how crazy you are you're seeing your [ __ ] nuts and that actually has a real value a systematic collision with the [ __ ] in your head has a real value because when the [ __ ] offers you up a shitty suggestion in the rest of your life which is basically its job like oh yeah you should eat the 17th cookie or say the thing that's going to ruin the next 48 hours your marriage or whatever you're better able to resist it so what like what do you do so I mean the basic steps of mindfulness meditation artists it most people close their eyes you bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath just you're not thinking about your breath just feeling the raw data of the physical sensations and then the third step is the biggie which is as soon as you try to do this your mind is going to go bonkers you're going to start thinking about you know what's for lunch to an ADA haircut where the gerbils run well whatever blah blah blah you're just going to notice Oh my mind's going crazy right now but that noticing is the key moment is in fact the victory it's interesting because this is when most people think they've failed that the good I can't meditate because I can't clear my mind this is the the biggest misconception about meditation you do not need to clear your mind that's impossible unless you're enlightened or dead the whole goal is just to notice when you become distracted and start again you return your attention to your breath and you just do that a million times and every time you catch yourself wandering and go back to your breath it's a bicep curl for your brain it changes your brain and that over time creates the kind of metacognition I was discussing before where you see that you're a homo sapien sapien in other words you're oh that's how we're classified as a species with the one who thinks and knows he or she thinks and that just that knowing that you have this voice in your head as Sam likes to joke he feels like when he thinks about the voice in his head he feels like he's been hijacked by the most boring person alive just says the same [ __ ] over and over a joke that I a lot of them all the time yeah that that is enormous ly powerful because then you are not held hostage by the source a similar thing happens in the tank I do do a form of meditation the tank sometimes when I go in there with without an idea like if I'm not working on material or anything else where I just concentrating on my breath in through the nose out through the mouth and I just literally concentrate on the breath and the same thing happen that's meditation well yeah we yeah it's it's not similar it's the exact same thing the difference is in the tank after a while after about 20 minutes or so that breaks loose too psychedelic states Wow they ever combined the tank with psychedelic yeah alters de cera yeah yeah yeah sweat rip what but LSD or mushrooms mushrooms but the big one is edible pot edible pot seems to be as strong as anything in there I got enough pot where I'm convinced I'm going to die when I climb in there and right every time I do it I go don't do that again so cuz I just get out so terrifying what's your motivation when you're eating the pot and climbing into the tanks well see what happens okay yeah just be scared be terrified really yeah because nothing ever has happens you never die but god damn you just convinced that the universe is imploding around you and it so it usually has the character of fear being they made part of it but it's also not embracing the fear not letting the fear run rampant and just sort of relaxing and giving in to the vulnerability you're the finite nature of your existence and just breathing and concentrating and letting letting the dance take place some there's some sort of a weird that one of the things that there's a big misconception about when it comes to edible pot is it edible pause like smoking pot it's entirely different process physiologically your liver a time course is very different to and you can stay stone for three days yeah you can you can [ __ ] up and eat too many brownies and you'll be gone for a long time that sounds miserable it is but it's not because you get something out of it when it's over the process is excruciating but when you come out of it you just feel so happy feel so happy it's over yeah it's like that joke about the dude is banging his head up against the wall and something is why you're doing that he says because it feels so good when I stop mmm in a way but there's no physical damage banging your head up against the wall you're going to hurt yourself this is true yeah I don't know I think there seems like there may be easier ways to get to the same wisdom club maybe but I think there's also creativity that gets inspired by the edible pot something called eleven hydroxy metabolite that your body produces it's it's so different than most people when they eat pot they think they've been dosed like anybody who's smoked pot before and then you give them a brownie they think oh my god there's something in that and they're convinced because reality itself just seems like it just dissolves and especially inside the tank there's something about the tank environment that produces in the absence of any external stimuli your brain becomes sort of supercharged because what you're trying to do when you're just sitting down and concentrating and relaxing is you're trying to focus on your thoughts but you're still aware of your body you're still aware of your elbows touching this desk your butt touching the chair there's all these different factors that are that are there's stimuli that's coming into your senses where as in the tank there's none of that virtually it's almost completely eliminated there's some but you can you can you could phase that stuff out like you could still feel the water a little bit if you think about it you could still you sometimes you bump into the wall and you have to like Center yourself and you have to like relax again and make sure you're not moving so you don't touch things which can kind of dissolve the experience their experiences meditation where you have that same experience where you lose your sense of the body but it that usually comes with more concentration and you have to be very concentrated on them I feel like you would have that experience and it would be even more intense if you did the exact same thing you do outside the tank in the tank I don't think you need any psychedelics in the tango it's one thing I tell people when they ask me shouldn't get high before I do it and like no just do it just do it if you decide after a while you've done it three or four times you're like I wonder what it's like if I just take a little bit of a hit of pot and see where it takes me there's nothing wrong with that I'm going to hurt you you know if you're a type of person enjoys marijuana or whatever but the tank alone by itself just the absence of sensory input your brain goes to a very very different place and as long as you can relax as long as you don't think of too much about the fact that you're in the tank just concentrate entirely on your thoughts entirely on your breath and again let all those crazy like where the hamsters live like all that [ __ ] let all that stuff run wild through your mountain but I feel like in the tank at least that gets to a certain spot and it stops existing and then the psychedelic state takes over yeah well it depends on what the goal is I think there can be many different goals of meditation or in a quasi spiritual practice and they're not there they're distinct so I mean the center of the bullseye for me is not suffering unnecessarily right so and so one thing that that mindfulness gives you is I mean so it's potential with every experience you can have and there's nothing in your experience that isn't an appropriate object of meditation you just most people start with the breath because it's just a very convenient thing to start with but once you know how to do this particular practice you're just your goal is to just be clearly aware of whatever your experience is in each moment so it's emotions arise thoughts arise sounds come in your your attention is wide open to whatever your experience is so it's not like so nothing in principle is a distraction I mean they could be meditating right next to a construction site and the sound of the hammers is just as good an object of meditation as the breath or anything else so there's nothing everything is included but the the superpower you're after which you actually can acquire through this practice is to realize that virtually all of your of your psychological suffering and actually arguably virtually all of your your physical suffering I mean the or the difference between physical pain and suffering which of those two are not quite the same thing is a matter of being lost in thought it's a matter of thinking without knowing that you're thinking and what and what mindfulness does and really any technique of meditation ultimately should do is teach you to break the spell of being lost in thought and to notice a thought as a thought I mean the huge difference is until you learn how to meditate or do something like meditation you're just helplessly thinking every moment of your life you're having a conversation with yourself you're having content whether it's imagistic or linguistic pour forth into consciousness every moment and so incessantly that you don't even notice it's just white noise and not only does it completely color your experience moment to moment so like if you're if they're angry thoughts you're angry if they're depressed thoughts you're depressed they're sad that you're sad so you become your thoughts but you also feel you feel you feel identified you feel that you are the thinker of your thoughts you feel like a self and it's a completely structured by this flow of meditation every moment and it produces everything you do it produces all of your intentions and your goals and your actions and he said this about me and now I'm going to say this it's like is everything coming out of you is born of this the same process and meditation is a way of recognizing that consciousness and what you are subjectively this prior condition of just the awareness in which everything is showing up sound sensations and thoughts and thoughts can become just other objects of consciousness and so I'm going to take you even a very basic example of the difference between pain and suffering you can feel very strong physical pain unpleasant pain and just be aware of it in that like the sense that it's unbearable is virtually always untrue because you in that moment you've already borne it right the mood the feeling that something is unbearable is really the fear of having to experience it in the next moment in the future right because you're always like if somebody someone drives a nail into your knee right you might well that's a sounds like it's unbearable but every moment you are feeling it you're bearing it right it's like it's it's you what you're what you're thinking about is the last moment and the next moment then you're thinking about how much that will you know when am I going to get some relief and you know what's the cure and how badly is my knee injured and you know like you're you're worried about the future continuously and you're not noticing the automaticity of thought that is that is amplifying the the the the negative negativity of the experience in that moment and we all know that you can have super intense sensation which is either either Pleasant or unpleasant depending on the conceptual frame you've put around it so for instance if you had this you know massive sense of soreness in your shoulder that you would experience it very differently if it was a the result of you dead lifting more than you ever had in your life and you were proud of it right be probably cancer and you're waiting for your you know the biopsy results and and you know you're worried about you this is the thing the things going to kill you or you're getting raw you know they're like some deep tissue massage and it hurts like hell but you actually totally understand the source of the pain and you know it's going to be gone the moment the guy pulls his elbow back right so it could be the exact same sensation each one of those but the conceptual frame you you have around it totally dictates the level of psychological suffering and or the convicted total absence of psychological suffering now we were talking before the podcast started about your apps and we were talking about the amount of different meditation exercises on the apps like what kind of different meditation exercises are there if you're talking about just concentrating on mindfulness and breathing as it turns out you can iterate off of that basic exercise in some tip to like the infinity essentially because you talk about not only well I don't want to get too ahead of myself but basically the the basic instructions are that we listed before you're feeling your breath coming in and then when you get lost you start again but then you can add on to that so one big thing to add on is something called mental noting so you're breathing in and out you're feeling your breath and then you get distracted by a huge wave of anger generally speaking when we get hit by a wave of anger we just inhabit the anger we become angry there's no buffer between the stimulus and our response to it but there's this little technique you can do just making a little mental note of that anger and that kind of objectifies the thing it's a little bit like pressing the picture and picture button on your rug control where the story that's taken up the whole frame can be seen with some perspective so that's one example of the little techniques that you can add onto the basic exercise and you can go for a long time so as we were discussing Sam's about to start his meditation app which is going to be called what waking up we're here and I have mine which is called 10% happier Sam is going to be doing all the teaching on his app and on my app since I'm not a teacher we we have experts coming in like Joseph Goldstein again the friend of a friend of both Sam and I and you each teacher has their own emphasis and you then start talking about applied meditation so how do I use it when we're how do I use in my everyday life how do I use it if really what I want to do right now is control my eating so meditation for example we have a course on the app that talks about using it to not overeat by the way I'm terrible at this but you can use your ability your mindfulness your ability to know what's happening in your head in a given moment without getting carried away by it to not overeat notice oh I'm having this urge right now to eat as I did last night an entire bag of malted chocolate in my hotel room but I don't write that urge and not do the thing that I know is stupid so anyway that's just a little taste of how you can take meditation and bring it in kind of numerous directions do you guys feel competitive both of apps no I didn't even analyze not yet no I feel but not not yet and he comes out and completely cannibalize his mind and then both then yes how happy is for me I actually ever sent happy yeah I'll be like negative five hundred percent yeah what was ten percent of zero yeah exactly no I actually think I'm of the view you know now that I've been in this meditation app business for a little while I'm kind of I don't think it's goober I don't think the business model is that there's just one huge app that everybody uses and maybe there's some distant you know second I actually think it's more a little bit more like fast food I think is gonna be a bunch of big players and and you may switch back and forth and so I think it's just one need a nap no no no you don't but it been a thing that's useful and it's really useful at any level of expertise in meditation at least this kind of meditation is having someone guide you yeah it's it's like a a mindfulness alarm that's constantly going off or going off at you know periodically over the course of 10 minutes or 20 minutes or however long you're sitting and because distraction is just continually the problem and you're either meditating or you're distracted you're either you're either aware of what's happening at that moment or you're lost in thought and that's true throughout your life I mean you're either hearing what I'm saying right now or you're thinking about something else and you don't know it right or you're either reading the book you're intending to read or your mind is wandering you're gonna have to read that paragraph again so this is failure to concentrate this failure to be able to focus on what you're intending to focus on is it just this this universal problem of human consciousness and so meditation trains that and the other benefits follow but the having a voice in your head reminding you that you're even attempting to be meditating is very powerful even if you're even if it's your own voice I'm even in when I'm recording to a meditation that I record it just my own voice remember reminding me that I'm that I'm supposed to be meditating it works like any other voice you know and it's um it's oh it's just it's a feedback system that you can't really provide for yourself although you can Mehta mean you can meditate without an app and most people do I mean I've spent very little time meditating with apps I just think they're they're very useful but you you know both of us started meditating you started meditating well before I did but we both started pre the apps weren't around so that you can read you can read a book read a good book and learn how to meditate out of the book and just basically remember the basic instructions and do it but it really is useful to have an app especially for some people because one of the biggest problems in meditation is this persistent fear that you're not doing it right and so to have a voice you trust in your ear just giving you reminding you of the basic instructions which are so simple but very easy to forget it can be very useful I like the idea of it being like bicep curls for your mind yeah I mean it you see you see it in the brain scans and Sam will correct me where I run afoul of scientific accuracy here but this base the this simple act of sitting trying trying to focus on one thing at a time and then when you get distracted knowing you're distracted and returning to your breath is changing your brain when you do that you're boosting the muscles the obviously the muscles when I'm using a light loosely you're boosting your focus muscle and in many cases whether there was a study in 2010 I think was done at Harvard that took people who had never meditated before and they scan their brains and then they had them do eight weeks of I think a half hour day of meditation the end of the eight weeks they scan their brains again what they found was in the area of the brain associated with self-awareness the gray matter grew and in the area the brain associated with stress the gray matter shrink that to me is pretty compelling [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: JRE Clips

Views: 831,492

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, podcast, MMA, UFC, comedy, comedian, stand up, funny, JRE, clip, favorite, best of, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, Dan Harris, meditating, mediation, isolation tank

Id: GB3RGu8Go2s

Length: 23min 17sec (1397 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2017