Waking Up: Dan Harris + Sam Harris

but briefly so as many of you know I've the last 10 years whirring out loud about the effects of religion in our world in a way in which it's it's shattered our world into competing tribes and I've really made it just three arguments on that front I've argued that that are competing religious doctrines can't possibly be true because of everything we've learned in the last two thousand years and they're mutually incompatible as well so this was Bertrand Russell's brilliant insight that if you even if we knew we were faced with God's multiple choice exam and we knew that one of the answer is Judaism Hinduism Buddhism Islam was correct still most people should expect damnation because they just can't these are mutually incompatible ideas and there's just no way they're all true the other thing I've argued is that is that they're these beliefs are on balance harmful because they just divide humanity from itself in ways that that generate conflict and then finally I've argued that that the good things people think they need from religion can be had in other ways and in ways that that don't pose a problem for understanding the world scientifically and don't divide us in sectarian ways so my this book is really my effort to continue that third argument a little further and show that we can have rich spiritual lives and and seek out and experience the farthest reaches of the continuum of human well-being without believing anything on insufficient evidence and without paying lip service to the idea that we need to maintain some sectarian affiliation and some fascination with mythology and some pseudo scientific assumptions in order to get that project started and that really seems to me to be the one of the most insidious effects of moderate and liberal religion at this point in history it even when it seems totally benign or even beneficial even when it simply causes people to gather in beautiful buildings and think about the mystery of existence and talk about their their ethical lives it carries with it the the tacit message at the own that there's no really intellectually defensible way to do this that you need some measure of infatuation with mythology and some bogus assumptions in order to find a container for your existential hopes and fears and a way of explaining the most transformative experiences that you've had in your life and that's that's something that I I try to argue against in the book I don't know if that's a sufficient starting point if you want to look at least need more time to ask you - yeah all right one of your key arguments in the book is a big one and a counterintuitive one for most people which is that the self the I that is the ridgepole of our lives the you know the the me that is putting my pants on in the morning and making dentist appointments etc etc actually is an illusion right what do you mean by that yeah well I'll tell you what I don't mean by that it's it because we use this word self in many ways and one way we use it is to refer to the whole person so so it means your body it means your mind your autobiographical memory your emotions everything about you that's yourself and so clearly I'm not saying that people don't exist our people are not illusions and so I'm I'm really sitting here it makes there's no problem talking about me as a discrete person in the world another way we use this term self is to refer to the feeling that we all have of being located in our heads as the subject of experience but most of us don't feel identical to our bodies we feel like we have bodies we feel like we're riding around in these bodies as though we were a kind of passenger in a vehicle and we feel behind our I feel like we exist behind our eyes in a way that we don't exist behind our needs our knees are down there there are they and the rest of our bodies are our property in some strange way and we are we feel like we're a locus of consciousness at the subject a thinker of thoughts a theater of feelings inside the head and there's been research done in this where you ask people to to judge when an object is closest to another person and people judge an object to be closest to that person when you put it near their head as opposed to near their chest or near their toes or and they judge it closest of all when you put the object near their eyes as opposed to the back of their heads so we feel like we're behind our eyes and I feel like other people are behind their eyes and when you start to meditate most people you close your eyes and you feel like okay I'm up here behind my eyes and now I'm trying to pay attention to the breath or to sensations to the sound of a mantra or whatever your object of meditation is and that starting point of being a feeling like you're the thinker of thoughts and the notice or of everything you can notice is a false view it doesn't make sense neurologically we know there's no place in the brain where the where then ego can be hiding there's no place there's no one point where all of the processes that deliver your conscious mental life come together all of this is distributed over almost the entirety of the brain and all these independent processes can be independently interrupted so there's not there's no one point that could be the seed of the soul and it's disconfirm about through meditation when you look for it with sufficient rigor you can actually look for this thing you're calling yourself and fail to find it in a way that's conclusive you can have a you can look for the thinker of thoughts and have the sense that there's a thinker in addition to thoughts fall away you can look for the descent the feeling of that there's a center of experience behind your eyes and have that feeling of center drop away and this for lack of a better word we can call this self transcendence and people experience this in a variety of ways and saying most of which are really haphazard you know the people in you hear of it very commonly in athletics where somebody's surfing or their they're doing martial arts or they're playing basketball and for whatever reason they have a moment where they just they feel there's no distance between themselves and the task so they're not thinking about what they should be doing they're not they're not error-correcting they're not you know if they're playing golf they don't have thoughts in their backswing when and they're just totally at one with the that moment of very often physical activity and those moments become incredibly addictive that's that's what people love about about athletics or it's the you know the that's the a peak experience certainly for any athlete that just feel totally at one with with their sport and the problem however is that that to experience that in a haphazard way gives you absolutely no control over it and it doesn't become an antidote to your unhappiness in any kind of global sense because you're left thinking well then it's just it's just a matter of surfing I just have to get back in the water you know I got to get the wetsuit on I got a there's no other way to feel that good but there is because meditation actually allows you to recognize that that is a property of consciousness that's just intrinsic that this itself is a construct the self is the feeling of being a self or an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking and it's a it obviously is our default state it's it's more or less everyone's default state but it can be penetrated and penetrating it has has is it has a variety effects of effects that we can talk about but it's it's the it really is this the center of the project that I'm calling spirituality of secular spiritual but what I mean I think a lot of people are attracted to meditation because they want to feel calm or maybe they want to boost their ability to focus they want to be more mindful and in by which I mean they want to be able to manage their own emotions or not be yanked around by their emotions in other words they want to be 10% happier you're available to find what matter what's the matter with that why you setting the bar at like transcending the self right and what's so good about transcending the self right well without denigrating that project exactly I think I think I'll go on to denigrate the project with all due no I you know there's absolutely a time and place for just adding another tool in this kind of incremental search for self improvement it's it's there's nothing wrong with viewing meditation as the best way to reduce stress or to improve your performance you know you could be a CEO who just wants to feel more confident before he gives it gives a presentation or just wants to be able to focus better at a meeting and meditation will will help with that and there's nothing wrong with just putting a very narrow frame around its prospects and and using it for that purpose but I do actually a view and so that in that case in the most limited case we might think of mindfulness as a kind of executive stress bowl where you just use just something that is useful but it doesn't totally reorient your life I view it more like the Large Hadron Collider I view it really as a tool to make some fundamental discoveries about the nature of our minds and and some of these discoveries can be hard-won people can can meditate for years without noticing that the self is an illusion even while trying to discover that the self is illusion and this is a bit of a paradox because as some teachings are clearer than others some teachings almost encourage you to overlook this insight and some spell it out very clearly and I in the book I try to spell it out as clearly as one can in a book but the one of the things is that that there's a sense that most people get when they meditate well first of them how many people in this room have have a meditation practice or have spent any time doing mindfulness okay well let's just just so that we get on the same page yeah that's not the usual room one stumbles into but let's just take two minutes to do this practice of it what you all know what we're talking about the act of opening your eyes I assume most of you closed your eyes the opening the eyes often imparts the sense to people that something has really changed so your eyes are closed you feel like you're just in your head meditating somewhat cut off from the world you're hearing sounds but you open your eyes and anything all here here's the world again this is the outside of me this is I was in I was just focused on the inside of me but here's the outside of me put this outside of you is just as inside of you as anything you were noticing with your eyes closed this is my saying there's no real world but but your experience of your open eyed visual field is this is the same place where you were thinking and feeling the breath this is this is as a matter of neurology or brain but it is it is also it's a space in which thoughts are arise and you can you can demonstrate this to yourself just by visualizing something in this space you can just visualize a you know a bonfire on stage here and depending on how your burette depending on your powers of visualization you can actually you'll see something it's different when I say see a bonfire here that's different from my saying see a 400-pound tomato there's some you when you try to see one as opposed to another there's a there's some kind of flicking flickering phenomenology here and some people who have really keen powers of visualization just drop an object there like it's photoshopped so this is this you're in your mind even when you're in the world and so this this you can you can meditate with your eyes open there's nothing reason necessarily to close them but one thing I'd like to point out about this and this this technique I just showed you is now universally called mindfulness it's it's a type of awareness that cut that's practiced in a tradition of meditation called the pasta which which is the pali word for insight and it comes from the tera vaada buddhist tradition which is the oldest tradition within Buddhism and one thing to notice about mindfulness is that it's it's just a clear and non-judgmental attention to the contents of consciousness you're not you're not doing anything to change your experience you're not adding any artifice you're not there's nothing you have to believe in order to do this you just all you have to believe is that it makes sense to pay attention to your mind if you want to notice what it's actually like it's you can enter this totally from the point of view of scientific hypothesis that if you use your attention in certain certain ways or directed in a certain area something interesting might show up so mindfulness is the tool that that is many people have adopted as their primary mode of meditation for one reason because it's it's perfectly designed for export beyond the religion of Buddhism into secular scientific culture and it's been it's now what people mostly study when they study meditation in the lab and it's most is what most clinicians recommend as opposed some other practice where you are silently repeating a mantra or visualizing a Buddhist deity or something doing something else which seems to link up to some tradition that you then have to ask why why would I be focusing on any of that but the it this becomes a tool for making some fundamental discoveries about the nature of your own mind the simplest of which is and inevitably the first one you encounter is a beginning meditator is that you you are lost and thought 99% of the time you're just you're just thinking to yourself every moment of every day and much of this thinking is making you unhappy but most most of what you think is unpleasant motivate some of you maybe unlike me but for me it's like I've been kidnapped by the most boring person on earth I'm just forced to have the same conversations over and over again and you and there is something hallucinatory and about this because you you do have the same conversations with yourself over and over and over again and it doesn't strike you as strange is it whereas it would just imagine if someone if everyone could hear your thoughts broadcast a monitor you would you would sound completely insane and yet these silently to yourself it doesn't it doesn't strike you as the as the the hallmark of psychopathology but it from from a Buddhist point of view and from a traditional contempo to point of view it is a kind of psychosis it is a it's a way of not really understanding in the present moment what your situation is in the world and the the fundamental thing that we're confused about is that we have a permanent unchanging self riding around inside our heads but okay up until that last sentence you were just making my case for me that mindfulness is great it can really change the way you see the world and but my question is so why add on top of that the whole illusion of a thinker or a knower behind though you know directing the show why is that so important what will that do for us that we should be striving for it as opposed to just not anymore mindful right a few things there what one is that it's it's it's just true and it's interesting it's it's worth discovering because it's just there to be discovered it also when you think of it for me that the project really is finding another way of capturing the deepest and most transformative experiences people have so people experience self transcendence this is just a fact and they experience it in various contexts and certain of these contexts are clearly pathological in that they are framed by crazy and divisive beliefs that cause immense harm in society so you know the guy who's just getting off the bus in Syria right now to join Isis he is undoubtedly having and has had what he considers to be profound experiences they whether they're he's had clear feelings of self transcendence or not there's definitely more expansive sense of self age as an overriding of the normal egoic neurotic program that most people feel and he has peak experiences that are channeled and given substance and given a meaning in the context of really psychotic beliefs or psychopathic beliefs about the wisdom and necessity of murdering infidels and apostates and so and then you know another person goes to Burning Man and has a probably a similar range of positive conscious states framed by totally different ideas and in a far more benign context and people go to the khumba mela that Tim just mentioned so the contexts are irreconcilable in terms of the stories people are telling themselves about the significance of their experience but there's a range of experiences that are kindling these stories which people find to be the most transformative of the most important experiences in their lives and when they because it's just the nature of the case the this the ego is a painful illusion with a sense that we all have of being inside our heads truly separate from experience is painful and this pain motivates people in a variety of ways and when they find this pain is waged in the context of divisive and ridiculous ideas they become mightily attached to those ideas and they and some of it sometimes are willing to die for those ideas and to have their children die for those ideas so I think we need to find an alternate context in which to talk about this end of human experience and if you're going to if you're going to talk about that if you're going to find a way of talking about the ecstasy of a jihadist who's was just about to detonate his suicide vest you need to be talking about more than stress reduction you need to be talking about more than just what it is an executive is interested in when he coat takes a mindfulness course and so you need to ki need to capture the whole project that Tibetan Lamas who spend years in caves think they're they have a piece of and the people of Burning Man think they have a piece of is this this whole aspiration to experience the full range of positive conscious states and to undermine this sense of just being a skin and capsulated ego and that's it's it's there to be that those experiences are there to be had and yet the traditional ways of talking about them are benign at best and almost never at their best so so how do we get there you showed us mindfulness meditation what do we you know most of us were interested in meditation we we learn basic instructions that you showed us and we're off to the races yeah what else should we be doing to to know our minds other than MDM yes well so yeah I think I said earlier that this is somewhat paradoxical because because this is it's right on the surface you get this sense when you learn to meditate so I just taught you how to meditate and you close your eyes or not and you focus and then there's this expectation that the truth if you're going to find it has to be deep within somehow you have to really drill down on the breath or whatever it is you're paying attention to and have some highly non-ordinary experience it can't can't be close to where you are because you know you're just neurotic and thinking every moment and you're new and you're struggling with this practice of meditation it turns out that's a false view that the selflessness is actually a feature of consciousness that's right on the surface and it's right on the surface in a way that is similar to the optic blind spot and that's a analogy I've used before you may have heard me use it you've all heard about the optic blind spot it you've probably had it demonstrated to you in school where you you have a figure and there's a fixation cross on one side and a round circle on the other and it you're supposed to stare at the cross with one eye and close close the other and if you bring the paper or the screen close in to the right distance from your from your eye the SIRT the round circle will disappear and it looks it exposes that you have an area in your visual field where you're getting no information and yet you never notice this and surely most people in human history have never noticed this and those of us who know about it go for years without noticing this but if you if you close one eye right now and look out at the room unless you're in the front row you see a room filled with heads but you know someone's going to be missing a head if you close one eye and you're not going to notice that and yet it should be possible to notice these things so and the blind spot is not deep within it's not something that it really is it's almost too close to you to notice this is analogous to this feature of consciousness and the selflessness of consciousness and there are other ways to point it out but again any way of pointing this out requires that you have enough concentration enough mindfulness to not be lost in thought when you're when you're asked to look and so this is and this is something that really only training can give you but I'll give you another trick that that is as useful it comes it actually comes not explicitly from Buddhism but but from an architect Douglas Harding who some of you may have heard of he he was influenced by Buddhism he spent a lot of time studying Zen he actually was a someone who grew up in a fundamentalist cult essentially in the UK and expressed his doubts with sufficient fervor that he got excommunicated and he went to India and finally had an experience that he described as having no head and he was standing at a place called Nagar code which is a which is a place near Kathmandu that gives you a beautiful view of the Himalayas and he was looking at the mountains and he realized that he didn't perceive his own head so he says where his head where he knew his head to be all there was was mountains in sky and this is true of us all the time if you're again if you're other than the front row you're looking at a room filled with heads but yours is not one of them you can't see your head and if you look for where you know your head to be if you as just with your eyes open looking straight ahead if you look - if you incline your attention so you know you just if you point it at your own face with your finger and you try to look in the direction of your own face now again this seems somewhat paradoxical but trust me there's there's a there's a manoeuvre there that that works you if you look for what's looking you might discover in that in that first instant of attempting to turn attention on itself that there's a subtle shift that there can be a sense of in Harding's description of having no head there's a say and some people just can access this by just imagining not having a head just just try to remove that from your shoulders and realize that the only thing where your head where you know your head to be is the world but most people find that helpful to actually look for what's looking or look for their own heads and the it's a very subtle gesture of attention and it's in the first instant of making it with with real focus that this shift can happen but there's a shift of where you will no longer feel like you're and again this will only last for a moment or two before your thoughts will intervene but you'll feel that you're no longer behind your eyes looking out at the world there'll be this sense of the center having dropped out of experience and in that instant it would be true to say that that there's only the world you know then the world is and your experience of the world is consciousness and in in traditions in in certain traditions of meditation that this is called what the non duality of this experience is emphasised they talk at you talk about non-dual awareness so the the usual sense of subject object awareness is I'm over here looking out across space at that glass but it's possible to look for what it is I think I am looking across space at that class and to experience in that moment just pure scene just no distance from the active scene so there's no seer and seeing a thing seen there's just pure scene and mindfulness can can produce that experience if you but it as it's often taught it's not taught in a way to emphasize the non duality it's more like in mindfulness you focus on the glass so closely and so relentlessly that eventually the sense of distance collapses where you just you have to experience moments of pure scene by dint of the fact that you were so focused but in Douglas Harding's case and this this is actually echoes other other techniques in Buddhism you you actually look for the thinker of thoughts or look for the the observer and in that instant of looking notice how that changes the sense of consciousness but it it's a it can be it can be frustrating because it's not this is kind of a steep exercise where you if you unless you can get an immediate result this you have a sense of not knowing what to do if it's many of you are probably left thinking what the hell is he talking about I've got a head is right here and I'm just you know I'm incited and I don't know what's going on but there's there is a the antithesis or the the barrier to the to these insights is thinking without knowing it knowing that you're thinking that is the antithesis of every practice of meditation you would ever learn whatever its purpose there's going to be a moment where you're focused on what it is you're trying to focus on and they're going to there will be many many moments where you're lost and thought and not aware that you're lost in thought the thought just comes up from behind in some inscrutable way and you and it dictates the the structure seemingly of your subjectivity if it's a thought of you know worried about tomorrow you're just worrying about tomorrow and how you have no I you've completely forgotten that you were supposed to be meditating or that you're even trying to follow me to the end of the sentence you're just thinking and it's that automaticity the that has to be countered you in meditation training of any kind which is not to say that we're trying to get rid of thoughts because thoughts are just going to continually come and thoughts themselves can become their own objects of meditation but in the beginning it's certainly true that the choice seems to be one between actually paying attention to what you want to pay attention to and being lost in thought and and so it's but there's nothing to do but keep looking at this if it's at all interesting to discover this and you are motivated by the sort of two sources of motivation you can either be interested in how your mind is and and what can be discovered about it through introspection or you can just be suffering and be made interested by the character of your suffering and Buddhism tends to emphasize the suffering side of the story probably for good reason but the the engine of your suffering you'll find really is you're thinking just over and over and over again about the things that make you unhappy and so that's breaking that spell is the antidote to to the tremendous amount of psychological pain so just to put a fine point on a fried noodle standpoint you would say to those of us who are beginners that we want to start with some mindfulness practice to build our powers of concentration to be able to notice that we have thoughts and our thinking and then from there once we have a sort of foundation we start doing these sort of looking for the self that doesn't exist exercises yeah right yeah yeah mindfulness is the necessary condition for really any practice of meditation just just to be just to know the difference between being lost and thought and being aware of whatever it is that's arising in your experience that's that is the that's the only context in which you can really do any practice now there are certain practices that have rather narrow functions and in Buddhism they're their variety of practices they're called concentration practices where you're you're trying to cultivate a specific mind state for a specific purpose and a very popular one for obvious reasons is is loving-kindness practice where you're trying to produce the mental state of loving-kindness for ultimately all sentient beings as a way of overriding your tendencies to be judgmental and hateful and selfish and every other mental state that is not loving-kindness and you you can tune this emotion up to a remarkable degree and have an experience very much like what people experience on MDMA where you just you feel you know unspeakable love for everyone for no good reason just you're just in that state and you know that's a very attractive way to be in the world so but that's it so that's a practice where you really do have a goal in mind you're trying to create a certain mental state and keep it humming along on the hard drive with mindfulness you're not trying to do that and with with really any fundamentally deeper form of meditation practice that that's trying to get at the intrinsic qualities of consciousness you're not trying to produce any specific state you're just trying to recognize how consciousness already is and and so it's not goal-oriented in in that way and that's that's freeing but there you keep stumbling into subtle corruptions of your practice where you you though you know you're not supposed to be trying to change your experience you are covertly trying to change it and and mindfulness then becomes a tool to feel better and yet the desire to feel better is itself the same program of seeking happiness that you use in every other area of your life and if you're carrying the disease along with you it's you're you're not accepting the present moment that's what you you want to feel better you're wanting to feel better is predicated on feeling that this isn't good enough and that's not mindfulness it's not it's your so you can be you can be fooling yourself by strategically paying attention to the breath or to anything else or it'll say unpleasant emotion like anger arises and you were trying to be mindful of it so that it will go away that is that's not mindfulness they can feel you might get lucky and it'll go away but the the the deep insight is to recognize that that consciousness is simply the context in which anger and other emotions arise and pass away and that it's it really isn't it never really takes their form it never really is fully corrupted by anger or improved by joy and when you can when you can do that strangely strangely you can kind of have your cake and eat it too there because when you do that when you just just give up the war with your emotions and with your experience and just let whatever comes come you find that the unpleasant things just arise and vanish very very quickly it's impossible to stay angry for more than a few moments unless you're lost and thought about it and a very pleasant quality of peace and well-being comes that is kind of intrinsic to consciousness is not something it's a it's not something that has to be manufactured and it does sort of equalize the extremes of experience and it's what you wanted in the first place but it's not it's not had by seeking well-being and that's yeah you just have to keep getting out of your own way and mindfulness is the tool to do that before when I asked you know why she would be trying to transcend the self you did a classic Sam Harris movie you serve in your soft voice said something devastating what was that something because it's true oh so I I was uh I was having dinner with my mom the other night who's a scientist and a meditator and novice meditator and familiar with the Buddhist literature and she was questioning this claim whether it's true she said essentially it's a faith claim you can't we don't have any just because we can't find it when we close our eyes doesn't mean there's no self or just don't know what would you say her mom yeah I had no idea well this is sort of based on the premise that which we use more or less everywhere in our intellectual lives that that what doesn't survive scrutiny can't be real that if you keep looking at something and discover that it collapses into something else and it never collapses in the other direction this is so this is how we we detect any visual illusion so you know in my public talk on this topic I put up in a visual illusion called the Kinesis square where you have and is in the book actually there's there for partial circles which seem to frame a white square in the middle of the page there's 3/4 circles that articulate the corners of the square but the the connecting lines of the square don't exist it's all just white the white page so your initial your initial visual experience is of seen as clear as day a white square in the middle of this page but then when you look more closely you see that there is no square they're all there the only thing on that page are four black partial circles and so this is a classic visual illusion and it's it's incredibly hard to just see the circles and not see the square because your your visual system its edge detectors have been fooled and they just just keep detecting a square where there's no square but if you look closely you can see how the trick is done and there's just no question that these circles are more real than the square it's just they're the square is merely implied it and it does not survive scrutiny now so it encountering a skeptic like your mom you know I view this as a similar situation albeit a more esoteric one it's as though encountering a skeptic who would say square is just it's just as real as the circles as the partial circles you know how prove to me that it's not in this case I on the diagram I can actually put a finger on the non-existent edge of the square and say well there's no there's no edge here right so this is K we can manipulate this in interpersonal space but and it's harder to do that in getting you to look for your head for instance although that is it's a similar effort but again it's the same principle where you would those who put themselves in the best position to look at the thing and look hardest and look longest will converge on this on this discovery which is the self you think you have can't be found and and the feeling that there is one is itself a thought is itself a an appearance in consciousness that is uninspected and you can see you can feel this well just you can see see this logically because okay so this descent the self that you think you have feels like something right it feels if it didn't feel like something you wouldn't think you had one right so it's it's showing up somehow you have a feeling of self but the sheer fact that is showing up proves that it is among the contents of consciousness it's an appearance however inscrutable in consciousness it's a feeling of some kind otherwise you'd you wouldn't feel it right I give you another I mean easier to grasp analogy of the soap so just consciously move your hand right so you're now this is a voluntary gesture that we're all engaged in and you can stop it at will and you can start it at will and you can stop it now this is this is as voluntary if anything ever gets right this is this is just this is you if you ever aw if you're ever going to be the author of an action it's this right here that you can start and stop on command so there's some how is it that you differentiate this feeling of authoring this action from an action that just happens to you like a muscle spasm or something that you could is clearly involuntary well there's something you're feeling that differentiates them otherwise you you wouldn't differentiate them otherwise it would all seem automatic or it would all seem voluntary there's got to be some difference between the the jerk of a muscle spasm and this thing that you really have dialed in you're in the driver's seat and you you know you got this now that feeling is an appearance in consciousness right now it's probably to speak in neurobiological terms it is your brain has produced some predictive model of its ensuing output right and that predictive model feels like something it's it has a kind of internal signature that that's an appearance and consciousness however difficult is defined again it's now a logical argument that by virtue of the fact that it's appearing in consciousness I would argue to you that consciousness is prot the prior context of its appearance it that thing that feeling of agency can't really define consciousness a consciousness must be prior to it and the mere witness of it so what is it what is that if that feeling that being a self is just an object in consciousness I'll give you another sense oh so one in listening to me talk right now many of you are having the experience of it's almost like watching a movie you're you are you're like you're in a darkened theater watching the movie on screen and you are unemployed like on tact with you you don't really feel the sense that you are being seen you're not self-conscious I want you without making a sound at all just turn and make eye contact silent eye contact with some stranger around here for two seconds the to it don't hesitate just do just just a couple of seconds of eye contact sorry now you're all completely freaked out okay but you you felt you probably felt something right you felt there's a kind of an intensification of a feeling of self-consciousness with a moment you know you're going to turn and know that someone at that moment is looking at you right then all of a sudden you feel implicated over here you are the thing behind your eyes that it can be seen right now a moment moment before I said that you were just sort of in the darkened movie theater unhhhh implicated right that intensification that feeling that's an appearance in consciousness that's showing up right that the consciousness is the prior context of that feeling that's that's the self that that that is what we feel we are and I guess intensified when we're when we're acutely self-conscious it gets relaxed when we were watching a movie and we forget we're even watching a movie and we're just totally in thrall to what we're seeing and so again if you keep falling back into this experience of just witnessing the contents of consciousness you can discover that the thing that's doing the witnessing that the consciousness itself doesn't feel like a self it doesn't feel like what you're calling I it just feels like the space in which everything including the sensation that you have been calling I his appearing and changing so I feel like my mom was being deliberately obtuse and can I tell her that you feel the same way well I wouldn't put it that way but so I I solicited some questions so I'm going to open it up to audience questions in a second but I solicited some questions on Twitter today and I was awesome actually I'm gonna only I'm gonna ask you to first of all will Ben Stiller play you in the bio the real question is is there a loss of moral accountability when one loses a self I'm still stuck on the Ben Stiller fit I don't know if I if I inflamed your sense of self no no I just I don't know if I've told this story before in public I must have somewhere but I was once this was coming up for me a lot like 10 or 15 years ago when and it comes in cycles when when Ben gets you know briefly incredibly famous when he when he releases a film on there Ben Stiller sightings that are focused on me you know I've been recognized as Ben Stiller almost as much as I've been recognized as myself and when this was happening I went to one of his movies long times this mystery man I don't know what you're and I was thinking I don't look like Ben Stiller what is everybody talking about I was watching this movie and about two-thirds the way through something something diabolical clicked in my brain and that was my face on his body for the rest of the movie and I just couldn't shake it it was just a bad acid trip so I acknowledge that I that we the headline here is that you see Ben Stiller movies yes not it not everyone but I forgot the other question what was your view what was your view a Night at the Museum - yes I did not see that I the question was when one loses a sense of self does one lose moral accountability right no well this actually goes to the the other side of this same coin which I wrote about in my book free will which it really is thus it is the same intuition the sense of self is the thing that is under writing this feeling of free will and which seems to make free will a prompt philosophical problem of lasting interest to people now I've argued at some length in that in that short book and elsewhere on my blog that the notion of free will doesn't make any scientific or philosophical sense and ultimately doesn't make any experiential sense either but that's hard it's a rather harder pill to swallow so so people have spent a lot of time trying to map free will onto reality so we have most people start with this sense that they have a very clear experience of free will and the challenge is just to make it square with what we know about biology and what we know about causality and and the obvious fact that no one picked their parents no one picked their genes no one picked their environment no one picked the ways in which their environment sculpted their brains no one picked the state of their brain and all the charges at every synapse no one no one created their neurophysiology and yet their neurophysiology is the very next thing that you're the proximate cause of everything that they're going to do and think and intend in this moment and every moment forward so so free will doesn't make sense and yet everyone knows they've got it well it's because everyone knows they've got this self that is pulling the gears and levers of of experience in each moment but the problem what the people's worry we on the topic of free will is that if you you drink the kool-aid and admit that there's no free will and in this case that there's no self well how do you make sense of moral responsibility how do you just you just open the prisons and let everyone out because you know everyone's not guilty by reason of insanity and the answer is no you can still even if you view people as not truly the the authors of their actions it's just a confluence of causes just weather pattern you know benign or dangerous weather patterns it still makes sense to defend yourself against the dangerous ones and we would lock hurricanes up in prison if we could and and that were the only way to keep ourselves safe from them and so certain people clearly have to be locked up because we don't have a cure for their problem but if we did have a cure for their problem if we had a pill that was the cure for psychopathy for instance well then we would just give the pill to psychopaths then it then it wouldn't make sense to punish a psychopath who killed a bunch of people because he loves it if we have a cure for that feeling of sadism that makes somebody want to kill people because he loves it and it's just because in the absence of a cure we feel like well that's that evil bastard he really deserves what's coming to him if we knew that that was a born of a genetic problem which to some degree must certainly be or a genetic and environmental problem which it must certainly be we couldn't really blame that person in the way that we want to and yet we could take all the steps we want to protect ourselves from him help him if we could help him the crucial change for me when you get rid of this notion of a self and free will is that it opens up the door to compassion for even the worst people who have ever lived because you see them not as the ultimate authors of their actions you see them as in sometimes unlucky you know there's there's there's you know but for sheer luck as Adam at as a matter of genes and as a matter of environment you know none of us any one of us could have been Saddam Hussein or Hitler or you're the worst person you want to pick from the pantheon of evil people you're talking about you in every case you're talking about people who did not create themselves and so you know we can consider ourselves lucky not to be murderous Psychopaths and when you meet a murderous psychopath you can view that person as essentially a great white shark or a grizzly bear or some other creature who can't help but live by this program that is genuinely dangerous for everyone around him and that's that doesn't so that doesn't preclude us taking steps to to protect ourselves it's just it undercuts the basis for hatred it makes no moral sense to hate mentally ill people and to some degree not to some degree to every degree once we truly understand evil in causal terms it will be a species of mental illness there's not it will be a the classic example is Charles Whitman who got into a clock tower at the University of Texas I think in 66 64 and he killed his mother and his wife and then he climbed the clock tower and then shot 30 some-odd people and killed I think 14 and so this is this seems like a prototypical evil person who deserves whatever he got and he got killed by the cops in that case but he wrote a note which was a fact his suicide note which declared that he loved his mom he loved his wife he didn't know why he was doing any of this he was fit he had been filled with rages for months that he couldn't control and he strongly suspected that there was something wrong with his brain and he recommended that his brain be autopsy so that people could find out what was wrong with him and they they found a glioblastoma in the hypothalamus pushing on the amygdala which is a totally plausible place for a brain tumor to be eroding somebody's impulse control and giving them rages and the moment you hear this about Charles Whitman you think well that guy was a pure victim of biology he was he was unlucky you know and and so that it's the tumor is totally exculpatory except here's the problem and this problem is coming to us the more we understand the brain everything is like that tumor every fact of neurophysiology is just a more complicated brain tumor it's a and in the end we'll deliver that same emotional message which is this guy was unlucky this guy was you know this guy it's too bad you know Jeffrey Dahmer had the genes and life experience that made him a enthusiastic cannibal rapist we don't have a name for his condition but his condition was born of causes that preceded his conscious authorship of anything and so that's so moral responsibility does sort of erode in in in ways that people fear and yet in its place we find a basis for compassion and a loss of hatred and we find no less reason to lock dangerous people up the only thing that changes is if we if we had a cure you know if with Charles Whitman if you could catch him before he actually killed everybody and got killed himself and you just saw him to be a dangerous psychopath and you scan his brain and you see he's got this golf ball-sized brain tumor well then you just perform surgery and that you wouldn't punish him knowing he had this tumor you would you perform surgery on him and that would be that would be the ethical thing to do well I think that I think the more we understand the mind in terms of the brain that is going to be at the punch line just across the board

Channel: RubinMuseum

Views: 342,047

Rating: 4.8775368 out of 5

Keywords: rubin museum of art, art, public programs, buddhism, Sam Harris (Author), Philosophy (Field Of Study), Waking Up, Dan Harris, Sam Harris, Spirituality

Id: 0PTAc4WqZAg

Length: 56min 46sec (3406 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 04 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I highly suggest this man for his views on meditation especially. He is the reason I'm able to stick with meditation these days, and in fact I find myself much more comfortable with spirituality and less judgemental towards those who are religious, without ascribing to their beliefs.

I still find the slaughter, hatred, and politics that have come out of religion disturbing and unacceptable, (I. E.: I don't care what your religion is, don't go and justify killing hundreds of thousands of people on the grounds of a god or gods), but I wholeheartedly understand that people suffer, and that religion is a way to cope with the inevitable pains of life. For that, no one deserves critique. In my family a lot of legitimizing has come out on the basis of religion, which I find unacceptable and preachy. Those mentalities have, in the past, withheld me from getting into spirituality, since it led me to believe people who are into spirituality of any sort were just thoughtless, arrogant, self justifying jerks.

Tl;dr: this guy is fantastic; he scientifically approaches meditation while acknowledging the spiritual factors behind it.

[u/santsi]

Thanks OP, I really appreciate the link. There were two highlights that seemed really profound to me. First one was his point about religious sects contextualizing the feeling of transcendence to their own purposes. The second point was the argument how freewill is unnecessary from the perspective of non-self and how that evokes compassion. Kind of amazing how scientific world view and spiritual teachings can find themselves.

It's impressive how much Sam Harris has grown from his four horsemen days. He didn't just settle to criticising religions, but went deep into understanding spirituality.

[u/Reprobates]

The book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, is well worth your time http://www.amazon.com/Waking-Up-Spirituality-Without-Religion/dp/1451636016

[u/[deleted]]

There are many people who can speak articulately about secular spiritualism, but Sam Harris brings a lot of other baggage to the table. I think he makes important critiques, but he has, at times, gone overboard in his defense of secular spiritualism and veered into making moral judgements that others use to justify violence and intolerance. Here is an article titled New Atheism, Old Empire, that describes his position about religions, particularly Islam.

He has important and true things to say about meditation, but in other areas of thought and belief, he makes arguments and statements that breed intolerance and judgement. Just as I believe in decoupling spiritualism from organized religion, I think it needs to be decoupled from the kind of judgemental secularism that Sam Harris encourages.

EDIT:: I'm sorry for starting this. It is reasonable for a thread to have sprouted from it, but I should have put a link to the appropriate subreddit for the discussion that I should have been able to guess would ensue. I don't know which that would be; I think we are capable of disagreeing about that too, and seeing significance in the answer.

[u/selflearn]

They cut out the 2 minute part where he says he taught them to meditate, anyone know what he would have said?

[u/denshi]

Is that water?

[u/sita757]

Good share.

[u/[deleted]]

If you are so worried about religion, it just means you are still hung up on it. Otherwise you would just be able to take what you needed from it, and disregard the religious elements. Being identified with atheism is as stupid as being identified with theism.