Sam Harris: Mindfulness vs. Happiness Part 1 with Lewis Howes

but the most concerning thing about our world is not that there are a lot of bad people doing bad things it's a lot of good people doing bad things under this this way of unfounded and and dangerous and divisive beliefs [Music] welcome back of one of the school of greatness podcast we've got the iconic and legendary sam harris in the house good to see a certain pleasure here thank you for being here I've heard about you for many years all incredible things and I'm excited to dive into your whole life yeah start from Javad now this kid now you've been you've been really known for meditation over the last few years one more what I've heard from you is more about meditation you've got this incredible app waking up app and your voice is so soothing that it's very relaxed you know or soporific depending on exactly in this when did you get into meditation and why did you feel like it was necessary for your life I was 18 and I had a drug experience with MDMA and this is before MDMA was cool yeah I mean a little I had I knew no one of my generation who had tried it or even heard of it I mean I'm sure someone had but it was this was 86 I think 85 86 and Sabrina raves as far as I know hadn't been invented and and this was this was kind of an export from the psychotherapeutic community that had been using it for quite some time and so it was given to me explicitly as a as a tool to explore the nature of consciousness and to realize something fundamental about about especially the relationships and you know my own emotional life and I really didn't know what to expect I can't say I'd only known one person who had taken it and so I sat down with my best friend and we we tried this drug and it it was really amounted to a total firmware upgrade of my brain and it was just you know it's not and again but I don't want to sound like a booster for psychedelics entirely I mean there's their downsides to all these drugs you know you you know I think I think MDA MDMA in particular stands a chance of being somewhat neurotoxic you know the day that at least it's ambiguous on that people can have bad experiences certainly on LSD and psilocybin and I've had those experiences and so like it's a mixed message and I have a chapter in my book waking up titled drugs and the meaning of life and there's actually an audio version of that on on my podcast it's like money to be the first podcast so if people want the full story there they can get it but the the reality for me was that this and this is true for many people MDMA showed me a landscape of mind and a way of being that I didn't realize was possible you know I was an eighteen year old who was you know very egocentric and you know my ego was well defended and and you know I had no you know the notion of experiencing unconditional love had not occurred to me and you know and there's many things that I just was not you know if you'd asked me you know what was someone like we're lid is that was someone like Jesus talking about what were the what was the core of all of the religions that people take so seriously in the experiential core of it I would I think I had just an empty file on that I just had no sense of you know what people have been doing for the last 2,000 years to transform their experience so so I had this experience of yeah of you know unconditional love is not too strong a word and so during this experience who felt unconditional oh yeah yeah I mean what I felt was the layers of self concern there that I didn't even know existed gets stripped away and what was left was a state of being that was just wide open and and has had as its ethical core just unlimited good in engine pouring other people whether their friends or strangers I realized that I loved strangers in the same way that I loved friends and family at the most basic level because I just wanted everyone to be happy and and and the that desire was so was so it was just turned up to 11 right so it was just like easy so you realize that's if if you are if the real ballast for you emotionally and ethically is that you want other people to be happy you want them to have beautiful lives you want them to be to realize their their dreams you want their I mean you basically you you realize that there's the sense that there's a zero-sum contest between your well-being or your happiness and others is an illusion right we want all boats to rise with with some tide win experience yeah so you want positive some interactions with people that was I mean that just it just bowled over every other wrinkle in my in my mind from the period of you know four hours right so it was just there was no there was no limit to that and it's not transactional you realize that that is actually a state of being that's that's the way you're that could be the default state of your own consciousness if you could only locate it you know and then coming down from an experience like that you know the drug wears off and then you're returned to who you used to be with the memory of what it was like a few hours before and so that then there was an imperative to figure out what just what was possible in terms of you know techniques like meditation or you know new understandings of how the mind works and what what there's clearly a path there must be a path by which one can have that experience more and more of the time and so then my notion of just what what the goal of meditation was and that that has actually changed a bit it's not about producing this state of unconditional love all the time I think that's that's not actually the center of the bullseye but that was the first experience I had which which gave me a sense of there's a path and there's some something to do did you ever feel like you had a sense of unconditional love before that moment oh no no I mean I had no reference point for no rough I mean I had love for you know I love my mom right like you know I you know there's no I love was a noun that I I could use honestly but no there was no I mean there hadn't been a glimmer of that experience really well I'm it was exactly the first moment of my life that I felt sane and I hadn't realized 18 yeah I mean it well be and it was only by comparison to all previous states I mean like I had this experience and I realized okay okay this is this is sanity right like they you know they and so it should be yeah yeah and the Ennis and the return to one's normal waking you know narcissistic neurotic consciousness was one of not not being restored to because because everyone's concern here is that it's a true it drugs you know one problem is we have this word drug that that is the the word we use to cover this vast class of compounds that are psychoactive and some drugs are awful and not worth taking and just intrinsically bad for you both in terms of what they do to you neurophysiological II and the kinds of states of consciousness that people you know in experience there and other drugs you know I would argue have immense therapeutic value and and are worth taking under under the right conditions and MDMA is certainly one of those drugs and it's being used as a remedy for PTSD now and a lot of research a great effect but people think oh you've taken a drug so this by definition this is artificial this is a this so whatever you experience there is is less like the real you then whatever returns when the drug wears off right but that wasn't the experience and that's certainly not the experience as you get deeper into things like meditation the doulton entailed drugs right you can actually discover that the way you're tending to be the way you've been conditioned to be by life and and biology frankly I mean we're not you know evolution has not designed us to maximize our well-being evolution has designed us to to be fairly paranoid mmm-hmm try to stay safe right yeah yeah no we're never selves we're we're apes right right now it's just this is not about our happiness on - from the be the genes eye view of what we're doing here is not you know maximizing human happiness and building a global civilization that will endure for a million years right that's just not what our genes care about you know they care about being safe or well they care about that all we've evolved to do is maximize the likelihood that we will successfully spawn and stay around long enough to see that our progeny survive and spawn right so it's like you're you know once you're 40 years old evolution doesn't care about you you know for the most part I mean I guess there's some argument that grandparents are a value or even great-grandparents or a value but it's just it can't see so much of what we need to be happy right you know it's like we're we're deeply conditioned for tribal violence right no tribal violence is just something that we obviously have to outgrow globally speaking we're deeply conditioned to perceive ourselves in at least potentially hostile relationships with all other you know apes like ourselves and and yet the self the the feeling of self and this is this is actually getting closer to what I think that the goal of meditation is the sense of self is an illusion right this is a this is a construct it can be felt through and discovered to actually be false and there's a there's an immense amount of good that comes with that discovery but it's not something that that has paid adaptive dividends in the past and it's something that you know it might actually be hostile to what would keep an a an ape you know safe you know for the for the millions of years or we and our ancestors have evolved right so there are many things there many good things and I would argue most good things that we want to be able to pay attention to in the year 2019 and that we want to have the free attention to to the free attention to to explore our would be counterproductive if you know you will return to the Savannah and just just in a contest of all against all right so I mean everything from I mean you know you know conversations like this and the work that we're going to talk about almost nothing that a that apes like ourselves have needed to focus on care for for 500,000 years when did we start to focus on the desire to be happy went like what year or years or decades was this where we really said okay we've got our needs met or basic needs met let's focus on being happy and feeling unconditional love more yeah well it depends who you're talking about because most of most of humanity even at this moment doesn't have the free attention to really think seriously about what it means to be happy you know it's just I made with the well you just look at the economic imperatives of you know most people in most situations it's not about really having the free attention to do whatever you want or what you what you would think at the end of the day would be most satisfying I just revival more yeah basic needs yeah yeah and and or just you're living in a situation of stark political and security right you're just worried about you know what sort of violence may happen in the street later today or like what you what you may or may not say they could get you jailed right you know it's it's not so like so so much of human history has been just friggin figuring out how to get strangers to cooperate reliably enough so that they have the free attention to explore the things we want to explore so that yeah we can figure out why you know we're dying from diseases and then you know cancel them right so like just just to just to be able to do science he's a luxury right and and this is where I mean as you probably know I've spent a lot of time criticizing organized religion because you know historically and even currently so much of it is hostile to let me say so much of its putting it in place of real curiosity and a real search for answers iron-age fictions that just got you know codified in books that can't be edited right so it's in my view that the main tool we have to navigate now and it has always been the case but it's it's just more and more imperative that we realize this the main tool is human conversation and what every religion is is a insistence by a certain group of people that we anchor ourselves to a conversation that have was held hundreds or thousands of years ago right so and so it's like you either you want to have the best ideas actionable and and and interpret about now or you want to be hostage to what your great-great-great great-great great-great grandfather and grandmother thought was true about the nature of reality and if you go back far enough you're talking to people who knew absolutely nothing that a 6th grader knows today right you know I mean literally if you could get a build a time machine and send a sixth-grader back a thousand years that boy or girl would be the smartest and why is this person on her and the war on hunt moons on so many topics right let me just just to know that electricity exists right you're you're a savant right so or that DNA has something to do with biological inheritance or the germ theory of disease and imagine being the lone person on earth who understood that you should you should wash your hands before you deliver pay to save the world yeah exact same humanity from so it's insane that we are captive to doctrines that just were never in contact with with the with a knowledgebase complete we have why do so many people believe so strongly in their religion and I'm not here to say someone's right or wrong but why do they that's why I favorite you can do what you want say why did so many people I mean there's billions of people that still believe in religion that have a religion and I believe so firmly in the beliefs of the books from their religion and yet they can't prove any of those things from those books is that right is that fair to say yeah can't believe it I certainly can't prove those certain things actually happen in certain books right except for just that someone wrote a story I mean yeah I mean some imagine that they have proof but it may it's off there's no actual physical proof today that these things know and I mean it's worth still the the the books themselves say that they're inerrant right I mean the Quran says that it's an arrant and the Bible says that it's inherent in various places and that is taken as evidence of its inerrancy well I mean the Lord of the Rings could I mean Tolkien could have put a line in there which said this is you know perfectly true and you know any doubt otherwise would get you you know consigned to hell and that wouldn't prove that the book is true so it's it's just you know it doesn't can it and and the amazing thing is that you know every Christian looks at the Quran and looks at the whole discourse around it within Islam and finds a completely unpersuasive you know and every Muslim returns the favor with respect to Christianity so it's it's not if you stand outside of one of these traditions you can see at the language game that they're playing within it to justify everything is is illegitimate but in in defense of religious people it's true that they're these core needs in life emotionally and socially that secular culture has been very slow to meet and in certain cases has almost nothing to say right so with especially with respect to the kinds of experiences you know we started this conversation I mean it's just the experience of self-transcendence an experience of unconditional love if you have that experience and you wake up tomorrow morning feeling unconditional love for all sentient beings right you you traditionally there has been no language with which to greet that epiphany but religious language and so you if you go into a church and say listen I've just had this experience they have a lot to tell you about you know Jesus and His grace and and you know and the power of prayer and it links up with 2,000 years of seeking experiences of that kind and a contempo of context you know monks and nuns and if you go too far then they begin to worry that your you know your your to heterodox and in the 14th century if you went too far you know they would burn you at the stake because you're you're claiming to be God yourself or you're claiming to be the equivalent of Jesus right so there's a there's a hierarchy there that you have to respect the same is true for Islam but yeah and so there's a baby in the bath water that that religious people are right to worry is being disregarded or being thrown out when you criticize and criticize these doctrines and then the other reason that religion indoors and it's really the main one is that you know we all die and the people we love and that is intolerable and it is it's true that if you can believe a sufficiently consoling story about what death means or what it doesn't mean a lot of the stress of life goes away gives you more peace yeah I maybe they do totally in certain cases total peace I mean it likely in certain cases it's if you believe the sufficient doctrines it's a good thing I mean you can literally get yourself into into a situation as it often happens under Islam where you know a mother can legitimately celebrate the you know the suicide bombing perpetrated by her jihadist son knows because she knows he got into paradise as a more and he got the whole family in there too right this is like you know it's the ultimate sacrifice yeah and it's it's all good I mean if you really believe it it's all good nothing has gone wrong there right and and so that's the power of belief and that's what you know it's the insidious power of belief because it's the thing that I mean something like suicide bombing should be impossible it should be impossible to convince somebody to do that right it should be it should be synonymous with you know severe depression and just you know an inability to find any goodness in life that's not the kind of person who becomes a jihadist and becomes a suicide bomber these are not the you know depressed people who would otherwise be you know medicated in a mental hospital because their depression is so severe no this is these are people who have a lot to live for for the most part you know the disproportionate well-educated these are people who are you know come out of engineering programs and colleges they can get jobs there's there's economic opportunity you know they have they have sincere beliefs in this case martyrdom and the reality of paradise so yeah so I've spent a lot of time you know worrying out loud about the consequences of those kinds of ideas because for me oh the most concerning thing about our world is not that there are a lot of bad people doing bad things it's a lot of good people doing bad things under this this way of unfounded and and dangerous and divisive beliefs the ideas are way more powerful than you know the 1% of us or the 1/2 of 1% of us have just happened to be Psychopaths right if you put a belief in it's like Inception it's like you planted a an idea so deeply in someone's mind that this is going to happen they believe it so much that they're willing to do whatever it takes yeah make a reality I'm curious what do you believe happens when we die I don't know I just I don't know I maybe that would require that we understand exactly how consciousness arises and and we don't understand that yet I mean there's a certainly good reason to doubt that you as you experience yourself most of the time as that you know the the the english-speaking you know person who or subject who has the episodic memories you have of your life that that entity floats off the brain and goes elsewhere right and that's that's the expectation that most people have who believe in Souls right and and when you when you hear people use so-called near-death experiences to justify a belief in an afterlife that's it's that kind of arithmetic that's being done they said well I was you know I saw myself in a tunnel of light or I saw you know I rose up off the table that we they were performing surgery on me I could see myself but then I realized I was you know not connected in my body and then I you know and then there's some story about how they met entities or met even met members of their own family who died you know and and there you know so if you can recognize your grandma and still understand English and then still have a memory of the life you're leaving all of those are modes of cognition that we know a fair amount about at the level of the brain now and we know they can be disrupted piecemeal in life right you know that we know that if you get a stroke or if you just if you go into a lab and they do TMS on you transcranial magnetic stimulation they can interrupt certain functions which you know really are no longer there anymore just because with the you know that neural real estate has been perturbed and so yet so the proposition here is that you know if you interrupt one part of the neuronal function you lose let's say your capacity to understand English right but if you destroy the brain of death everything about yourself is familiar will it can persist right that doesn't make a lot of sense so my we know a lot about mind being dependent on the brain you know all the function you could point to in yourself my vision mind versus brain what's the difference well do I mean the mind on some basic level is what the brain is doing and if the brain stops doing that it's it's reasonable to expect that the functions of mind will stop but consciousness is the fact that is like something to be associated with that with that information processing and that is still fundamentally mysterious I mean there's a there's a lot that our brain is doing that seems unconscious right that's and seems unavailable to consciousness in principle and so and it's these unconscious products that processes are delivering the contents of consciousness in each moment right so you and I are having a conversation I can see you I can hear you I can you know they're they're things that are stable that I can inspect because they are there among the contents of consciousness but how all of this stuff is showing up is unconsciously mediated and really can't be inspected so you know like I'm I mean the example I always use this you know because you know I'm always talking when I have used an example but so like to some degree you know however imperfectly I am managing to follow the rules of English grammar without knowing how I do this right and you're you're able to effortlessly interpret understand yes I and in fact you you don't even have a choice if I say the word pidgin right you can understand it I mean provided you're a native English speaker and that's in your vocabulary you can't help but understand it you can't it's like you can't say love whatever that next word is gonna be I'm just gonna block the semantics of it no the semantics just come in right because and so you're you're doing all of this your brain is doing all of this unconsciously and you can't you can't get to a place where you are standing upstream of the the parsing of the the sounds I'm making I'm just making a bunch of small mouth noises right and I mean it's and you know the difference when you're in the presence of someone is speaking a language of which you know not a single word you know whatever that is ty say it just sounds like pure gibberish and and and and the the surprising thing there is that you it's very hard to even imagine that anyone can decode those sounds and extract meaning at all right it just sounds like what it's amazing that that's a language right and yet once you know the language you can't help but decode it so all of that unconscious and and yet the fundamental mystery of our being and the most important thing in the universe really I mean the I would argue the only important thing in the universe is the fact that the lights are on as in and as what we are hear subjectively which which is consciousness you know if the lights were off right if it was all just if there was no distinction between biological systems and this table right you know if there was nothing that it was like to be you and there could never become something that was like to be you or any other physical system well then there is no there's no important distinction between the wet stuff we have in our heads and rocks and you know you know the water in the ocean I mean it's just it's all just stuff that has it can have no interests it can't it can't suffer it can't experience happiness it can't be deprived of happiness it can't be creative a candidate so the the good thing about this universe is consciousness and so and that's and the thing we can care about you know your your your life is as your your consciousness is in each moment and it means you you all you have is your experience and your possible experiences and you know the and that's the core of our morality to it's like a like we are we we are in a position with one another where we can affect each other's states of well-being and our opportunities to experience further well-being and in the future and and that matters and and our conversation around that is our conversation around morality and ethics and and you know politics and yeah you know so how do we how do we unlock our consciousness or expand it in a positive way well it's not an adaptation obviously but what are some how can we think differently so we can unlock this consciousness for ourselves yeah well there are many levels at which to do that I mean it's so there's there is some meditation is many different kinds of meditation but the kind that interests me most and which I most recommend is there often goes by the name of mindfulness now I mean mindfulness is very widespread but there's there's a sort of trivial versions of mindfulness and there's the deeper version and the deeper version is really to understand the mechanics of your own mental suffering and put yourself in a position to cease to suffer unnecessarily right so you you notice that that you're lost and thought almost every moment of your life and much of your thinking has this this mediocre character of causing you to worry about the future and and regret the past and and and just feel a a baseline disease with life right whether whether it is just you know what it was like for me to drive here in traffic and like oh yeah am I gonna be late you know supposed to be here 10 o'clock and like so like like so much of our life is the steady hum of that kind of thinking right and not to mention that you know the bigger concerns about you know disease and you know whether your child is sick and like we're thinking like we were plunged into thought in each moment and we don't notice it and until you learn to be mindful you can't notice that all you cut me you might have this abstract idea that yeah of course I'm thinking a lot of the time but you know so what or like well you know what's the alternative right there is no alternative you're just each thought will arise and completely capture your attention and then you are hostage to the the emotional and behavioral imperatives of that thought right so and so and and it's necessary just to some degree to be that way because we need we need thought and the we thought is the way we we organize our lives and and form plans and and understand what's happening right so like it's a yeah almost everything that makes us human is born of our capacity for abstract thought and and planning and goal formation and all the rest but it's possible to recognize thought as a stream of appearances in consciousness and to recognize that consciousness is a kind of prior condition of their arising and when you can do that you can actually break the link between thought and psychological suffering so if you if so the thought is a mandate and anxiety-producing thought right you can notice this whole process where a thought arises and you feel anxious and that feeling of anxiety in your body when once uninspected begins to generate the motive for further thoughts along those lines you're thinking about the thing that makes you anxious and because you're anxious you you're finding the anxiety and tolerable you've got resistance to feeling this this feeling and you're thinking about like how can I get out of this and like clearly I got a lot I've got a change here let me get it you know let's start writing some things down on a checklist you know and your your your thinking without knowing that your thinking and your feeling the motive force of this this emotion but if you once you can become mindful which is which is to just be aware of what's arising in consciousness without judgment without reaction without resistance right I mean so to be able to notice anxiety as a just a pattern of sensation in the body right and then when you can do that you can see that first of all it's not that bad right if in fact you don't dying ya know and and under under a different framing it's a sensation that is that is often Pleasant right like the the the the excitement you feel or even the anxiety you feel before you get on a roller coaster right if that's your thing it's something you're you're willing to pay to do sorry like yeah you want this thing you want that's part of the experience of skydiving yeah whatever it like like that's that's the you know the being able to have the thrill is a thrill because you have you felt some of that right now so and and that's why I say there are other levels at which you can you can work with the contents of consciousness so as to cease to be unhappy and and one is to change the frame around an experience like that so and to recognize that anxiety you know the anxiety you might feel before going out on stage in front of a thousand people just the raw sensation in your torso and in your face and I'm interested just the physiology of tenseness yeah yeah that is importantly similar to something that can have a positive frame which you seek out like excitement right I mean a much more extreme case of this it's like you can when you think of what the physical sensations are when you're working out you know and you know working out as hard as you can work out and in the most satisfying way they excite the precisely the work out you'll feel good for having done the actual sensations are can be extremely unpleasant and and if they just came upon you in a different context you would call 911 terrified right like it wedding profusely and my muscles are ripping yeah yeah so so it's just so the frame that leave the conceptual frame around experience does a tremendous amount but mindfulness is a more basic ability to notice this mechanism of becoming identified with thought and and resisting certain emotions and mood states and being able to just unlock from all of that and recognize that consciousness itself a that which is simply aware of experience it's not actually changed by by its contents I mean so like that which is aware of joy is the same thing as that which is aware of sadness right and on some level it's not diminished by sadness or improved by joy and you keep dropping back into that state and paradoxically and how believe that state begins to have its own kind of qualitative character which is which is more toward the good side of things I means more joyful and compassionate and loving and positive and because because the antithesis of all those states is what is happening is being is being kindled by our entanglement with thought and reactivity it's like it's like the resistance to you know I feel the sensations of anxiety say because I was lost and thought about how you know you know afraid of failure I am a moment ago I can break that spell with mindfulness and then notice that the physiology which still may take a few seconds to dissipate oh it's fine right it's just it's fine to feel that way it's like it has no more meaning in that moment than a pain in the knee or indigestion or something which is which you which you completely can contextualize and it has no implication for who you are as a person right like I don't you know you don't feel pain in the knee and abstract from that those you know unpleasant sensations back upon yourself and think I'm such a [ __ ] schmuck right like Who am I like my how did I become this person I would like it like it doesn't but people with anxiety you know if you're if you've got stage fright where you're going out on stage and you feel nerves that the potential for self judgment the potential to read into that mirror peripheral display of sensation that you're this person who is who's you know all you know didn't didn't work out right you know in the end you know people fall into that hole again and again right and it's complete it's completely it's not such a sort of unnecessary it's completely unnecessary and you know mindfulness is a tool that would allow you to discover that yeah if you could wave a magic wand or set the parameters for how you wanted to think each day of thoughts that you actually came in your mind and you could control it I'm assuming you control them in a lot of your own ways with your own strategies and techniques and awareness but if you can just say I'm sick of trying to control it or reframing things when they come up and you can just say I want to think these thoughts every day what would you want to think what type of thoughts would you want to think and what would you want to eliminate yeah what so first more fundamentally I'd want to recognize that the mind just the mind has no shame it just thinks it just thinks right so like the thoughts just keep coming and the you know the goal from a meditative point of view and this is a analogy that's used in Tibetan Buddhism is to get into into position where thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house so there's just no possible problem right yeah there's just nothing to steal very interesting so that is so to truly be indifferent to a good between a good on and a bad thought that's that's the real superpower it's cool so so that's so that's that's the kind of the more fundamental level of addressing the problem but it's also true that you can skillfully kind of curate the contents of your your thinking and think better thoughts deliberately and you can think more creative thoughts you can think more compassionate thoughts ethical thoughts and yeah I mean it so I'm interested in in many many things I want to know more about many many things I want to be you know write more often than I'm wrong I mean so that all of that's happening at the level of the the conversation you're having with yourself and other people and we end with good books and and so yeah and I think I mean their philosophy is like you know the Western philosophy of stoicism you know the meditations of Marcus Aurelius they're there there's so many good thoughts you know the if you if you were looking for a script that would generate a a reliable baseline of psychological well-being and ethical conduct you know that's the certainly part of the script I mean to be able to think and again it comes back down to reframing a lot so like if you know again to make a trivial you you're driving in traffic and you know someone cuts you off right the natural state sort of the the road rage state is to just be irate you know and to essentially hate that person that the person whose face you can't even see you can't even tell whether the person's 90 years old or 20 years old right and that should matter to you right oh they're like that you should have a different feeling about a nine year old than a 20 year old in that moment given the implications but so you know like the a stoical kind of reframing of that would be you to recognize you don't know what is going on in this person's life right and and nine times out of ten if you could know it you would feel compassion from what's going on there you know and you'd feel gratitude that you're not suffering the same problem I mean the one reframing I use all the time now is that whenever something bad is happening or something you know quote bad something that is causing me stress is happening I think of all the worst things that are not happening and I just think of how much I would pay you know literally pay to get back to the situated circumstance I'm now in that I'm now stressing about if you have any ambitions yeah right so like just see that's like legs if you exactly like you find out you you know you know I did not find out today that I have a brain tumor right so whatever I was stressing about today if I had if I got the call that I you know I have a brain tumor right how much would I pay to get back into precisely the situation where I was just stressing about you know whatever it was on my schedule or you know you know some hassle it's just it's not everything is a non-issue until it's a real issue and then so you when you take something that's a real issue like a brain tumor then you have then then the question is how much of the day are you going to spend having a brain tumor right I may be being busy having a break offering about exactly and suffering about your uncertainty about the future right so there's a time course to all of this so you know like at each point and this is where you know worry is almost always pointless because that you mean each moment there's either something you can do to solve a problem or there isn't right now if there is something to do well then just do that thing right solve the problem right if there isn't there's actually nothing to worry about like it could be that worry adds nothing to that situation right so you're so you know if you have a brain tumor yes you need to go from one doctor to probably to a second doctor for a second opinion and you find the surgeon you want and there's a whole process you're going to get an MRI you know all of it you're you're having to deal with a lot of yes objectively stressful things but I mean big picture we're all in this situation middle life itself is a brain tumor we're all gonna die well we're all what you are all going to go on this we're gonna get the full tour you know I mean for some of us you know some of us will be very lucky and it will be very orderly and free of pain and we'll be surrounded by everyone we love years old yeah it's just gonna go perfectly and for some people it'll be chaotic and terrifying and short or long because every permutation and I'm not denying that it's rational to have preferences there right I mean like you know you do want the orderly loving you know you know and not untimely unraveling of it all rather than the opposite but it's whatever is happening you have this moment and then you are thinking and you're and you're thinking about the future and you're thinking about the fact the past is the mechanism by which you will truly suffer in each moment because it is in fact true to say that even physical pain is something around which you can develop an impressive ability to be a quantum is right and we and we also have you know we have you know for extreme pain we have painkillers I mean like happily we're living we're not living in you know 1700 where you know someone is just kind of sawing off your limb I'm you know you know after the leeches didn't work so you know 99% of our suffering around everything you know even objectively horrible things like brain tumors is our thought about past and future is the regret and it's it's the story we're telling herself you

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 281,105

Keywords: : lewishowes, the school of greatness, podcast, interview, 2019, business, self help, motivation, Sam Harris, thoughts, happiness, mindfulness, focus, desire, consciousness, religion, patterns, mediation

Id: d0M1ycc_8Hg

Length: 44min 55sec (2695 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 17 2019