Welcome to the making sense podcast. This is Sam Harris.
Okay, well, there's a lot going on in the world but they will all have to wait for the next podcast.
Today, I wanted to give you a sampling of some of the content that we've released over it waking up. I recently recorded a 10-minute audio essay on the relationship between psychedelics and meditation titled, the Paradox of psychedelics, and thought that might be of interest to some of you here. And then, my friend Tim Ferriss, had requested about 30 minutes of waking up audio for his podcast. And so I'm adding the package, we delivered to him.
I'm here as well. Anyway, hope you enjoy it. And if you do, more information can be found over at waking up.com.
In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in psychedelics. One thing that these drugs do for almost everyone is proved Beyond any possibility of doubt that the mind is far more vast and interesting and malleable. Then they had any reason to expect before taking psychedelics, taking a sufficient dose of psilocybin or LSD provided. You have a generally positive experience. Makes it absolutely clear that you have been living in a
Kind of prison and once the drug wears off and you're returned to that prison, you can't quite convince yourself that it's good to live there.
If you have a truly liberating experience on psychedelics, it is difficult. Not to view a conventional sense of self as a form of mental illness. And many of us who practice meditation and considered among the most important things we've ever learned have arrived at this. Discovery only. After first taking psychedelics,
However, there is an apparent Paradox here because while psychedelics might be indispensable for some people, and I think they probably were for me, they are potentially misleading. Where meditation is concerned the reasons why people practice meditation and take psychedelics are often the same. They both exposed the mechanics of our psychological suffering and they both suggest that the remedy for. It lies in experiencing ourselves in the world Beyond
Our usual, Concepts, both meditation and psychedelics are a response to the felt dilemma of are simply being in the world. We once questions of our survival have been basically answered. We're faced with the question of how to be happy. What more is there to Life Beyond getting what we want and avoiding what we don't want? How can we cease to be mirror prisoners of time for instance in what sense and to what degree are feelings of dissatisfaction relieved?
By living more and more in the present moment. What is there to find in the present moment? That is truly transformative, meditation and psychedelics both address questions of this kind, but they provide very different answers. So I want to say a few things about the differences here.
The great strength of psychedelics is that a sufficient dosage? They are guaranteed to produce a profound effect. No one has ever taken five grams of mushrooms or 300 micrograms of LSD and been board. That has literally never happened. The resulting experience might be terrifying and that is one of the primary downsides of psychedelics the prospect of having a so-called bad trip, but no one ever says sorry.
Don't get what all the fuss is about, with psychedelics at a sufficient dosage. You need only wait an hour or so, for a freight train of absolute significance to come roaring into the station of your mind and For Better or Worse, you will get on it. And you will never be the same conversely, if someone has never taken psychedelics, it is quite possible for them to try meditation even repeatedly. And to claim that
Nothing happened. They look inside and they see nothing of Interest, right? What's the point of paying attention to the breath? How is that not the very definition of wasting time?
If a person has never taken psychedelics and never glimpsed that vast, firmament Beyond The Prison Walls of their conceptual mind. It can be all too easy, not to see the point of meditation for many people, learning to meditate without having first taken psychedelics. It's a little bit, like, learning to play a musical instrument when you've never heard music before, you've never experienced the final product at. All, right? So you have absolutely no idea.
We're all this plug-in it, strings and learning musical notation might be going and you can't verify that anyone else knows either, maybe the whole thing is just a scam by contrast taking psychedelics as like being dragged on stage with Jimi Hendrix. Rather it's like suddenly being Jimi Hendrix and whatever else happens over the next 10 hours. One thing is certain you will know what music sounds like, it might not be the only form of Music in.
It certainly isn't but there's no longer the slightest doubt in your mind. That music is a thing, right? So when you come down from the drug and your returned to your lonely guitar, even if you can't do much with it you can't deny what it was like to hear music coming out of that thing.
So psychedelics, perhaps above anything else, serve as a cure for skepticism about the basic project of having a much deeper engagement with the present moment.
The problem however is that they can give you a distorted sense of what it's worth finding there, because psychedelics work by producing extreme changes in the content of Consciousness. Or as the true purpose of meditation is to recognize the freedom that is inherent to Consciousness itself. Whatever its contents. If you take a drug like LSD or psilocybin, your perception of the world, and of your mental life, radically changes. It's not an accident that these drugs are also called hallucinogens,
And your emotional engagement with literally any arbitrary thing or idea can achieve an intensity that has no reference point in ordinary life and is in fact incompatible with ordinary life. Again, this can be true in both positive and negative ways you can be sent sailing across an ocean of bliss, or you can be hurled into a pit of Terror. And at either extreme, you can lose all memory of ever having existed in any other state on a sufficient dose of LSD or so.
Simon, you no longer recall that you are a person in a world much less that you have taken a drug. So these experiences of bliss, or Terror can seem truly Eternal without any connection to your life. And without any memory of the past, you really have been there in that state. Since beginningless time,
Now, if you have an unremittingly bad trip, well, then you might just conclude the drugs are dangerous and that the tray table of Consciousness is best left in the upright and locked position. But if you get a glimpse of the beatific Vision, you will know that it is possible to enjoy and utterly transfigured experience of the world and even to lose any sense of separation from it. And you will know that Consciousness In This Moment is truly sacred. However, you
Very likely come to believe that the path back to the sacred is to keep getting high if not through drugs and through a practice like meditation. And you will approach meditation in the hopes of changing your experience. In various ways, making it seem less ordinary, you might understand conceptually that the practice of mindfulness entails accepting this moment experience. Exactly as it is, but you will subtly or not. So subtly be straining to improve your experience by getting better at meditating
and whenever your experience does seem to change an auspicious ways, perhaps you get a feeling of bliss, or unconditional. Love in one of your sessions of formal practice, you'll seize upon this change. As a sign of progress. Surely getting more of that sort of things that point, right? But it really isn't, the point, the point of meditation isn't to collect more transitory spiritual experiences, the point is to recognize that even the most ordinary
Of mind is free of self and it is free of self already. It isn't made free by the practice of meditation and it isn't made more free of self. When you add the pyrotechnics of psychedelics, the ultimate purpose of meditation is to recognize what Consciousness is like, prior to identification with thought, and you don't need a 20-megaton change in the contents of Consciousness to do that. In fact, such changes aren't even help.
Ville. And yet many people are so identified with their thoughts and are so skeptical that there's anything profound to realize about the Mind by observing it directly that there for all intents and purposes unreachable. They either won't try meditation or try and they will think that they have discovered that it doesn't work. And the truth is I was once just this sort of Blockhead. I really don't think I would have recognized the power of meditation without having taken psychedelics without
First knowing that there was much more to the mind, then I was tending to experience. And so there is this seeming Paradox psychedelics are very likely indispensable for some people. But as for the project of Awakening from the dream of separateness, they're also misleading and ultimately unnecessary.
There is something that almost everyone learns by taking psychedelics that. You must unlearn to experience the true freedom of meditation. And this is why I created waking up to help people recognize the freedom of Consciousness directly. Because for me, regardless of how many times I could do legs open the doors of perception and they have many times. It is ultimately the simple recognition of the nature of mind, the Pure Freedom from self,
There is available in each present moment that has changed my life for the better.
I'd like you to take a moment to think about all the things in this life that you will experience for the last time.
Of course, there will come a day when you will die, and then everything will have been done for the last time.
But long before you die, you will cease to have certain experiences.
Experiences that you surely take for granted now.
If you're a parent, when is the last time you will pick up your child or tuck her into bed or read her a story.
Our youngest daughter still says aminals instead of animals and though, I'm a stickler for words, I am not correcting her, each one of those is priceless now thinking in this way, Allen's a poignancy to everything even to things that you don't like again, let's say you're a new parent and you're getting woken up several times a night by your baby, that's brutal.
But there will be a last time and knowing that can change your experience in the moment.
There's something sweet even about this experience.
It's possible that you will miss this.
We do everything, a finite number of times and yet we tend to take even Beautiful Moments for granted and the rest of the time. We're just trying to get through stuff, you're just trying to get to the end of whatever experience you're having
Tim Urban who writes this wonderful blog titled wait. But why often touches this topic he actually publishes a poster which represents 90 years of life. In weeks each line has 52 squares and there are 90 lines on a single page and the scale is frankly a little alarming to contemplate each week is a significant piece of 90 years and you can put your finger on the current week in your life.
You can see where you are and then of course you realize you have no Assurance of how many weeks you have left assuming that you have 90 years, certainly 90. Good years is generally not a safe assumption.
What you can know. However, is it each time you do something pleasant or unpleasant? That is one last time you will do it and there will come a time when you'll have done something the final time and you will rarely know when that is.
Princess. I used to love to ski and I know haven't skied and well over a decade. Will I ever ski again? I have no idea. But I can assure you that. The last time I took off my skis, I was not even dimly aware of the possibility, that it might be the last time, right? That I might live for many, many more years and yet this stood a good chance of being the last time I would ever ski.
When is the last time you swam in the ocean or went camping? When is the last time you took a walk just to take a walk?
As you go about your day today consider everything you're doing is like this. Everything represents a finite opportunity to savor your life on some level, everything is precious. And if it doesn't seem that way, I think you'll find that paying more attention can make it seem that way.
Attention really is your true source of wealth even more than time, right? Because you can waste time being distracted. So this is just to urge you to take a little more care. When you meet someone for the first time and you shake their hand pay a little more attention when you thank somebody for something mean it a little more.
Connect with your life and mindfulness is the tool that allows you to do that because the only alternative is to be lost in thought. And every time you notice that you're lost that you're distracted by a thought about the past or the future.
And you come back.
You are training your mind and it may feel like an effort at first but eventually, it's like continually waking up from a dream.
And ask yourself how much effort does that take?
Many people who are at first, skeptical about the benefits of meditation, find their skepticism relieved. When they hear that meditation, changes the brain, and there are areas of the brain that appear to physically change size in response to meditation. Undoubtedly, new connections are made and others are diminished and in addition to structural changes their functional ones and there does seem to be a more or less linear relationship between changes of this kind and the amount of time a person has spent
Practicing.
Now, this information is interesting and I will certainly discuss it in other contexts, but the truth is virtually anything, you do changes your brain. The fact that you had breakfast this morning and that you can remember, it changed your brain. And of course, learning any complex skill requires that your brain physically alter its structure. That is what learning is at the level of the brain. So saying that meditation changes the brain.
Is not to say that it's special or that it's good for you. Most things that are bad for you. Also change your brain, of course, there's a growing literature on the benefits of meditation but I want to suggest that there's nothing likely to appear in that literature that represents the deepest reason why one should meditate
For instance, their studies that suggest that meditation improves immune function or reduces stress or that is associated with less age-related thinning of the cerebral cortex well having a good immune system and reducing stress and not suffering, neurodegeneration are good things in general but those studies might fail to replicate tomorrow and should that happen my recommendations in this course would not change at all.
There really are deeper reasons to meditate and to live an examined life. In general. Meditation is a skill that opens doors that you might not otherwise know exist. And to say that you should do this because it reduces stress or confers any other ancillary benefit it's really to miss the point consider an analogy to reading is reading good for you. Does it reduce stress
Do you see what's peculiar about that framing given how profound the difference is between being an avid reader and being illiterate? These are strange questions just think about it does reading reduce stress it sort of depends on what you read. Right. Is it good for you? Well I think we can all imagine scenarios where it's not good for somebody in any kind of straightforward way but reading is
One of the most important skills, our species has ever acquired, almost everything we care about depends on it. Of course, mindfulness is a very different sort of skill, but it also has sweeping implications. And the other way to think about this is that you are always meditating on something, your attention is always bound up in something. We largely become what we pay attention to. We are building our minds in each moment, we're building
In habits and desires, and worries, and expectations, and prejudices, and insights. And mindfulness is just the ability to notice this process with Clarity and then prioritize what you pay attention to, why not pay attention to those things that make you a better person, why not free your attention from all of the trivial things that are clamoring for it?
Let's say you pick up your phone, to check your email and at that moment, your five-year-old daughter starts. Telling you a story.
Now, several things are possible. You could be so lost in your thoughts, about your email, and you can find the urge to respond to it. So compelling that you don't even notice that your daughter is talking to you. Or you could notice it only to rebuff her in a way that makes her feel terrible. And you might be so entranced that five minutes later. You wouldn't even recall that this episode occurred. That's how most people live their lives. In fact, that's how most of us live most of our Lives, even after we learned,
Meditate. But the more you train in this practice, the more degrees of freedom you'll find in situations like this. You can notice for instance, that your daughter is trying to get your attention and the giving her your attention is in competition with your following this urge to check your email, and when actual mindfulness comes online, you can feel the urge to check your email as a pattern of energy in your body, and simply Let It Go.
That is you can actually break the link between the feeling and the behavioral imperative. It seems to communicate is true that one way to get rid of this feeling is to check your email, but another is to Simply let go of it and only mindfulness allows you to do the latter and then you can direct your attention to the five year old who is standing in front of you and it might be the only story. She tells you that day and you can be aware of this fact in that moment.
You can feel the poignancy of that, and in that moment you can further and grain. This new habit, you can become the kind of person who is fully present in moments like that. And you become that kind of person, not just for yourself by changing your brain. But in this case, for your daughter by changing her brain, and this is just a thirty second Slice of Life.
When you learn to meditate, there are literally hundreds, even thousands of moments like this throughout the day. These are Choice points that wouldn't otherwise exist. These are paths taken and not taken for good reason. But without free attention there's no place for good reasons to land and as you grow in mindfulness, you begin to notice the lies you can no longer tell and you begin to have in.
Sites into your true motives in various situations that are, sometimes, not flattering, but you want these insights all the same, because how else could you become a better person? That is what it is to live an examined life.
So don't meditate just because it's good for you, it's more important than that.
When you sit down to meditate, you will find yourself assailed by thoughts.
Thoughts about what you need to do later in the day.
Thoughts about things that worry, you thoughts about things you want, or don't want the moment. You attempt to pay attention to your breath or to the sound of the wind in the trees.
You will meet your mind.
and your mind is the most rambling chaotic needling, insulting insufferable person, you will ever meet
It's like having some Maniac. Walk through the front door of your house, and follow you from room to room and refused to stop talking.
And this happens every day of your life.
It is possible to get him to stop talking for brief periods of time.
And that can come with greater concentration in meditation.
It's possible to pay attention to the breath, for instance, and to be so focused on it that thoughts no longer arise and this can be an extremely pleasant experience when it happens, but it's a temporary experience real relief. Comes when we recognize thoughts for what they are. Mere appearances in consciousness.
Images bits of language. The fact that a thought has arisen does not give it a necessary claim upon your life. It need not have any implications psychological or otherwise
Of course you'll continue to think and to be moved to act by thoughts but meditation gives you a choice. Do you really want to follow this next thought wherever it leads?
There's a story from 2012, I think, but I only recently stumbled on it online about a woman who was on a tour bus in Iceland. And at one point, when the bus stopped near a Scenic Canyon, rest stop, she got off and decided to change her clothes, and when she returned to the bus, nobody recognized her. So when it came time to leave, many people grew concerned that the woman in her original likeness was missing.
And they told the driver that an Asian woman in dark clothes had not yet returned to the bus.
And apparently the woman in question, didn't recognize this description of herself and so she to became concerned about the missing traveler and a search party was quickly formed and she joined it and the search apparently went on all day and into the night, and the police were notified, and the Coast Guard was notified to and they even ready to helicopter for use in the morning and it wasn't until 3 a.m. that the woman fine.
I realized that she was the missing person and of course the search was called off.
Now this is obviously a quite crazy and comical situation, but we're actually in a similar position with respect to our own minds.
Because we spend our lives seeking and the goal of our search is poorly defined. We get inducted into a search, by our culture, by the expectations, that others place on us, and which we learn to place on ourselves. And we learn that there are things we want out of life, largely, because others want them. We want to succeed in various ways rather than fail, and we need to acquire skills to do this.
I want all the social advantages that come with success. We want others to respect us why we want. This is never really inspected. It goes without saying this is something We crave. Of course, various sources of danger and disappointment seemed to lurk everywhere and, however, much we succeed. Things naturally fall apart, everything needs to be short up against the forces of entropy, and the landscape continues to shift, expectations.
Change cultures, like a vast tied that keeps sweeping everything out toward a horizon that we can't clearly. See where is all this going, what will life be like in 10 years?
Think of everything that captures your attention, the things you buy, or wish you could buy how you dress and all the preferences that are enshrined there in your closet. Your exercise routine, your relationship to sleep your diet, consider all your efforts to improve these things or to maintain them were to reconsider them. And of course, all the while you hope to have whatever fun you can have while making these efforts, right?
To entertain yourself socially or binge, watch the latest series on Netflix. You're continually in motion, as a matter of attention is just one damn thing after the, next then occasionally something big happens. Somebody close to you dies, say, and you have a moment to reflect on the whole spectacle of what is otherwise normal. And you might think, what is the point of all of this?
What am I up to really
now? I'm not saying the details of life, don't matter. It's not that fun, doesn't matter, or work, or money or clothing. There are countless transitory sources of satisfaction and if we have our priorities straight, these are ranked in a hierarchy of sorts at least implicitly. And we spend our time and attention in ways that are proportionate to what we actually value.
Now we might be lying to ourselves about what our hierarchy actually is. For instance, I might believe that my kids are the most important thing in the world to me, but if that's true, they should get more of my time and attention than my following college. Football does is against this background of seeking satisfaction amid ceaseless change that, you can see how radical. And act meditation actually, is meditation, is the act of calling off the search
It is the art of doing nothing but we should be clear about what it means to do nothing, because it actually matters, what sort of nothing one is doing. For instance, you can just spaced out and make no mental effort at all, and then you'll naturally be lost in thought just daydreaming. Now, this is actually our default State. When we're not explicitly paying attention to something, or trying to get something done,
In fact, it's hard to fault state. Even when we're doing many things that do require our attention like driving a car thoughts, just keep coming. And we keep thinking them for better or worse. And if you pay attention to the character of your thoughts, you'll find that you're mostly talking to yourself about all the things you want to do, or wish you a done to become happy.
You're continuously narrating the search. So that's not quite the doing nothing. We're after 11 first begins to meditate the practice seems like it requires effort. It doesn't seem like you're doing nothing. You're actually struggling to pay attention to the breath for instance or other Sensations in your body or two. Sounds are even two thoughts themselves. And the struggle is to sustain one's mindfulness for any significant amount of time, without being
I'm lost in thought.
And it's true. This apparent struggle continues for quite some time, but once you know, how to meditate, you discover that real mindfulness is free of effort. It to Simply appears like anything else. The clouds part all on their own. And you just notice the next thing you notice. And you can even try to practice this way from the beginning, and rather than strategically, pay attention to an object of meditation. Like the breath, you can practice. What's often called choice?
Useless awareness, where you just notice, whatever you notice without making an effort to stay focused on any specific object, but this isn't quite doing nothing either. There's still this fluctuation, this feeling of being lost and found this game of cat and mouse with a tension in the can still be the subtle or not. So subtle sense of seeking to get somewhere and the sense that there's a self that is doing the speaking.
The only way of truly doing nothing is to recognize how Consciousness always already is open unobstructed effortlessly aware of its apparent changes. You have to recognize what you would otherwise seek, the very context of any effort, you could make to pay attention, you have to turn about and realize that nothing is or can be lost.
Think of that woman on the bus, the moment before she realized that she was the object of the search. She's looking for a lost tourist.
And think of that next moment, when she suddenly realizes that, she is the one who has been presumed lost.
Now, is it accurate to say that she has now? Found herself was the search ever
fulfilled know.
There was a false premise that had been unrecognized, just think of how the sense of seeking evaporated in her case.
The recognition of Consciousness reveals that the contents of Consciousness are beside the point and all seeking is an effort to improve or to maintain or otherwise modify the contents of Consciousness. So, the freedom that you find in meditation is not a change in experience, really
It's the recognition of the context of experience itself. You simply need to drop back and recognize the condition in which everything is already
appearing.
Thoughts and intentions, and moods and emotions, Sensations perceptions, everything is simply appearing. As a matter of experience, there is no you apart.
From this flow. So the real way of doing nothing isn't just stop doing anything. It's simply to recognize that everything is already happening on its own.
Take a moment to close your eyes.
And become aware of your body, as a field of sensation.
All at once.
You don't need to take time to do this.
And notice your tendency to establish your point of view in your head.
Noticing the rest of your body as though, from above.
See if you can recognize it from the point of view of consciousness.
There is no above or below or inside, or outside.
Everything that appears is simply appearing in consciousness.
As a modification of it.
As a matter of experience, awareness is not in your head.
And it can't be aimed from your head toward other objects of perception or sensation or emotion or thought, everything is simply appearing in its own place.
All by itself.
Just as the sky need not make any effort to contain or open to the clouds.
Notice that Consciousness itself need not do anything.
It's simply the condition in which everything appears.
Including the sense of having a head.
Including every movement of attention.
And you're not aware of this condition.
You're aware as it.
When we practice meditation, one of the things we learn is how to begin again, in each moment. You notice that you're distracted even lost in thought for, who knows how long and then suddenly you return to a clear witnessing of the contents of consciousness.
You notice a sound where the breath or some other Sensations in your body or you see the present thought itself, unraveling, and in this clear noticing of this next appearance in Consciousness, we're training our minds. We're practicing a willingness to Simply return to the present moment without judgment without disappointment without contraction with a mind, that is stand-in truly free.
A of the past as always possible to recover this Freedom no matter what happens. Let's say you notice you're distracted and rather than just observe the next sound or sensation you're immediately plunged into self-judgment. You're annoyed. You subscribe to this damn app and you're supposed to be meditating, but you just spent the last five minutes thinking about something that you saw on television last night. But you can break this spell and begin again, at any point.
Aunt Bai just noticing self-judgment and frustration as appearances and the truth is there's good as anything else you can notice. When it comes to revealing the intrinsic freedom of Consciousness its openness, it's centerless, it's selflessness honestly, frustration real frustration. A mind like a clenched fist is just as good as the breath or a sound or even an expansive emotion like Joy.
If you'll just drop back and recognize what Consciousness is like, in that moment. Now this ability to Begin Again, has ethical Force as well. It's actually the foundation of forgiveness. The only way to truly forgive another person or oneself is to restart the clock in the present.
And this habit of Mind allows for a resilience that we can't otherwise find and there are literally hundreds of opportunities each day to practice it. If you notice that a conversation with a friend or a family member or colleague, isn't going very well, where you're not having fun at a party or even trying to get some work done. But you found the, you've just wasted the last hour on the Internet or you're working out in the gym. But you haven't been making much of an effort
The moment you notice this ghost of mediocrity, hovering over the present, you can fully exercise it just by beginning again and then fully commit by relinquishing the past.
There's no real reason, why the next 10 minutes in the gym? Can't be the best you've had in years. There's no real reason why you can't put this conversation. That's almost over on a new footing by saying something that is truly useful. So the practice is to stop telling ourselves a story about what has been happening and to fully connect with experience in this moment.
Notice this present thought this fear, this judgment, this doubt, this desire to be elsewhere as an appearance in consciousness.
And then just Begin Again.
Okay. Well, that was a sample of a few lessons from the waking up app. For those of you who might want to locate this content on the app, what you heard were the lessons, titled the Paradox of psychedelics the last time, don't meditate, because it's good for you, the veil of thought the art of doing nothing and begin. Again, it was also a moment thrown in there moments are short Reflections from 30 seconds to 2 minutes in length.
Arrive once or twice a day, if you have your notifications turned on, generally speaking, the aim of waking up, isn't to just help you. Meditate is to help you live a more examined and fulfilling life all together. And to that end, there's no shortage of resources, you can explore in the app. Now, including dozens of conversations, I've had with philosophers and Scholars and contemplatives, there are other courses with some of the best meditation teachers around and their discussions about psychedelics and sleep. And
Enos, and stoicism and effective. Altruism and much more. We recently added the full catalog of Alan Watts has talks to which are great fun. The app does require a subscription but it's also free for anyone who can't afford it. And we give a minimum of ten percent of our profits to the most effective Charities and we're actively looking for ways to encourage individuals and businesses to join us and doing that. Anyway, if you want more information about waking up, everything can be found at waking up.com
