Questioning Sam Harris

The contraction into self that is so toxic so much of the time, all of our deferring our happiness to some future time where we've met all of these goals that raise our status in comparison with everyone else we're comparing ourselves to, that whole stratum of being a person is a confection of endlessly thinking about ourselves—about our past and our future and even our present. And it's possible to punch through that, whether it's through using psychedelics or practicing meditation or just having you just a collision with the present moment that's engineered by something.

We're constantly modifying our experience so as to avoid discomfort, whether it's social discomfort or physical discomfort ... If you just try to sit still for an hour, you'll notice that all of the micro adjustments in posture that you're now no longer making are made because you really don't have to wait long before you feel miserable.

It is, in fact, true to say that for most people—I mean, literally, 99.9% of our audience—they couldn't pay attention to the breath for a full minute, say, even if their lives depended on it. It's simply not in the cards. The fate of the world could depend on it, and someone who's not really fairly well trained in this just couldn't do it.

I think it's a very important question: What's the point of examining the self, much less transcending it? There are several points; the main one is that it is the string upon which all of our suffering is strung.

The identification with thought is very much analogous to dreaming and not knowing that you're dreaming. And the switch from a normal dream to a lucid dream is analogous to the kind of waking up in the middle of life that I'm advocating here where you can actually just recognize thoughts as thoughts.

Just imagine what it would be like to externalize your thoughts on a loudspeaker ... Every every normal person would sound insane.

Any statement about facts relies on having first valued things like evidence and logical coherence. If you don't value logic, there's no logic argument you can give someone to say that they should value [it]. If someone doesn't value evidence, there's no evidence you could give them to say that they should value it.

The fundamental questions of what it means to live a good life, what are the requisites for living a good, how should we think about our place in the universe so as to have the best chance of living a good life—these are the most important questions anyone ever asks provided they have sufficient freedom to even worry about such things.

Meditation is a way of breaking that spell and actually being vividly aware of the present moment in a way that frees you from this automaticity of just viewing everything through your concepts and your discursiveness.

There's simply no evidence of consciousness anywhere in the universe but for the fact that we know it to exist in ourselves from the first person side. You can't look at a brain, even a living one, and form any intuition that it's a locus of consciousness.