How to Instantly Achieve a Calm State | Sam Harris on Impact Theory

If you feel anxiety, there is actually a place from which you can feel it well and be truly indifferent to it or anything else you may feel. I mean, first you can notice that anxiety isn't even that unpleasant, it's so close to emotion in its actual physiology that really the difference between emotion and anxiety is pretty much just the framing it's just the story you're telling yourself. You know if you felt these tingles and this slightly adrenalized response right before you know you're about to get on a roller coaster, that's part of why you're going to get on the roller coaster.

You like that experience, but the fact that you feel that way when you're about to have an interview or you're about to go on stage is intolerable, so just stepping back and realizing the power of framing has immense utility because then you may realize that the half-life of negative emotions is incredibly short. Hello everyone, welcome to

impact

the

theory

of our goal with this program and company are to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you execute your dreams. Today's guest is a neuroscientist philosopher and five-time New York Times bestselling author. His book The End of Faith won the 2005 Pen Prize for Nonfiction and spent an astonishing 33 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

He has a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Stanford, a doctorate in neuroscience, and has practiced meditation for more than 30 years, a combination that gives him a unique perspective. That has made him one of the most sought-after thinkers on the planet. He has given multiple Ted Talks with millions of views and his written works have been translated into over 20 different languages. Additionally, he has written for some of the most prestigious publications, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Annals of Neurology, to name just a few, a clear, rational voice almost unrivaled on some of the most difficult topics in the world.

Today, when he speaks, thousands of people appear in real life and millions listen online, and his ideas have been discussed by some of the most visible and respected media outlets in the world, including Time The New York Times, Scientific American Nature, and many others. . He is also the host of the award-winning Webby Making Sense podcast, which Apple named one of iTunes's best podcasts, so please help me welcome the man who has spent about two years in added silent contemplation. One of the four horsemen of the no-apocalypse. Sam Harris. Thank you. It's a pleasure to have you.

Yes, it's a pleasure to be here. I am very excited to dive. on some of these topics I think you have fascinating insight and what I've gleaned the most wisdom from you is what and these are very much my words on how to live a good life and that's where I want to start and it would be really interesting to hear your definition of what kind of life and way of thinking we should aspire to. Yeah, well, it's a tough question because my notion of human well-being is really open-ended. I don't think we understand what the horizon is, if in fact there is one for the ultimate flowering of conscious minds.

We have a pretty clear idea of ​​what we don't want and we are right to not want it. We don't want to be terrorized. and uh, depressed and we find ourselves constantly in conflict with strangers, finding our goals thwarted, so the generic situation we increasingly want to find ourselves in is effortlessly cooperating with creative and happy strangers, I mean, where there are seven billion Of us, we need institutions and laws and norms, uh, and ways of thinking that remove the friction from pleasurable, non-paranoid interaction with strangers. It's not just that you meet five close friends who turn their backs on you, I mean, clearly, we're all on the same team at some basic level and if we can't figure out how to build a civilization where everyone thrives to some degree, we'll have the world we currently have until it becomes unsustainable because we are now in a situation where I think it is reasonable to worry that our default

state

of partisanship and tribalism and rational fear of the incompatible goals of other groups and other people is unsustainable in the presence of increasingly destructive technology.

I just think we have to act. together psychologically and socially in a way that we haven't yet and when you think about that coming down to the personal level, do you think people have a north star or a purpose that they should pursue and to contextualize that, I'll do that. Because I always found myself wanting to ask people, I ended up answering the question for myself and therefore, for me, the purpose of my life from my perspective is to see how much of my potential I can activate and how many skills I can acquire. that have meaning and usefulness to me, that allow me to serve not only myself but others, and that feeling of always striving to always improve, always improve, show up every day and not think about whether I will get something across the line My goal is to generate a certain amount of wealth or something, but am I sincerely approaching the idea of ​​improving in a very specific direction based on what I want to

achieve

in my life or not?

And if I do it sincerely, then I say that that day or that life has been a victory and if I don't do that then I'm pointing in the wrong direction. Do you have any kind of guiding light like that that says that you would try to pass on to your children or that you yourself have? For you, well, I think it's good and I agree with it, but I can imagine other versions of having a goal that doesn't really totally overlap with that, I mean, you know it would be someone who could decide, for example, that they have a talent which is highly marketable and what they want to do is make as much money as possible so they can donate a large amount to help people, I mean money, money is just energy right, you just know if you're winning. billions of dollars and you're donating billions of dollars to good causes, you know, by an effective altruism metric, that's a lot better than going to Africa yourself and handing out food, you know, during a famine, right?

TRUE? Do you want to finance thousands? of people to do that well, uh, and if you have a skill, you know if you're a great singer or whatever and, uh, it may be a skill that you didn't spend a lot of time acquiring, so I don't have this whole story of domain that you have and that really resonates with me, so it would be a good life, you know, as long as you can extract the psychological satisfaction from it, because most of what we experience in philanthropy is when it's telescopic in this way , when you're just signing a check, you're not necessarily connected to the good you're doing, and I can imagine someone doing immense good in the world by signing very large checks but not internalizing the gratification of that on some level.

We have to be aware of the possibility of rowing two boats simultaneously. There are what are the effects in the world of how we live. So you know we want to have a good

impact

on others, but we actually want our conscious

state

s of psychological pain. and the pleasure of being assigned in some rational way to the kinds of effects we're having, so you don't want to be a callous person who just leaves devastated and unhappy people in your wake and enjoys that, I mean you. Are you a psychopath? If that's how you're tuned in, but you also don't want to be a person who is doing a lot of good in the world but isn't able to internalize the feeling of connection with others because you know you're too neurotic or you're too distracted or you just don't know connect with others?

So it's really interesting and I don't think I've heard anyone else talk about the notion of making sure that you're mapping what you're doing to be seemingly altruistic to really mapping your own internal state of well-being, so to speak, and listening to the discussions that you've had. had about Islam and how beliefs and ideas can be really dangerous. It made me ask a question about how and I'll basically summarize it quickly so you have people who have a book and the book has ideas and things that they have to believe and then act according to and because of where they grew up or you know what their parents and society those around them taught them, they internalized those beliefs and if we could, by communicating our ideas well, make them see something that caused more well-being for other people that that would be a better way to move their belief system then, do you think that a belief system is malleable in the sense that there is some element?

Well, you could choose this set of ideology or you could choose this and I don't know if you would say that one. This is truer than the other, but certainly one can bring us closer to well-being than the other and if you think that belief systems are, by nature, malleable things, what would the belief system be in a couple? tenants that you could hand over to someone who you believe would help them maximize their own well-being and serve the greater good, generically speaking, I think making our beliefs correspond to reality to some extent is obviously a good thing because if they're not you .

You are just crashing into hard objects, like if your map was completely wrong you would surely suffer, so we have to be in a situation where radical ignorance cannot be bliss, so that is a principle, now there could be a lack adjustment there. There might be situations where being completely right about what's true may not be optimal, right, it can be helpful to have a slightly delusional selfish bias, thinking that you're coming off better than you are, as if it might give you more enthusiasm. For the life of you, more confidence, but anything that's too off the record is just an illusion, and other people notice it and other people treat you like someone who's just not following reality and that's a principle, so I think we want our beliefs to be true. in some basic sense and therefore we want to be open to new evidence and better arguments perpetually correct because if you are if you close down if you say well listen, I'm done, I'm done thinking about reality and I know what's true.

Then, as more data comes in, you know when something is surprising, when one of your intuitions proves to be faulty, if you can't correct the error again, you will simply become out of alignment with what is happening in the world and with what. other people think it's true too, so really the only mechanism we have to do is human conversation. We have to be open to other people pointing out errors in our thinking and in the conversation we have with ourselves. we have to do the same we have to be continually open to the possibility that we make mistakes and in fact it is very likely that we will make mistakes many times and then you know, hence the virtue of educating yourself and surrounding yourself with intelligent people and reading good books and just expose yourself to the types of lessons that other people have learned for thousands of years and are learning in real time right now and you can live vicariously, you don't have to make all the mistakes that everyone is making around you so you don't have to , it's like you can look at Lance Armstrong and say "okay, well, it's probably not a good idea to lie, you know relentlessly about something, and then try to punish the people who caught you." their lives and then get caught and have to end it with Oprah apologizing, right?

I mean, you know you can internalize that lesson and understand something about the ethics and reputational costs of lying. So, given that, given conversation and openness to the intrusions of other people's thoughts, it's really the best game there is for understanding what reality is and how to navigate within it. So you can see that it's not optimal and you know that it's ultimately dangerous. Dogmatism is now dogmatism is simply holding on to an idea, no matter what. more comes into view, so there's nothing you can say to challenge this, so you know, I'll talk to you about all these things, but here's something I care about, some proposition, you know, some claim that something is true .

I care about so many things, I'm so emotionally attached to it that not only is it non-negotiable, if you keep pushing this way, I'm going to get angrier and angrier, right? I'm going to threaten you. with violence, that is the default state of organized religion historically and let me tell you that now certain religions have relaxed their intolerance to a point where violence is not explicit, but not only is that the default state of religion based on faith have a way of thinking about dogma, I mean, dogmatism is a good word in the context of religion, I mean, Christian dogma is not, it's not a derogatory term, they call it dogma for a reason, right, I can not understand it.

Catholics do it with this notion that you can believe something strongly without evidence or certainly without good evidence without evidence that can survive external pressure, so the idea that wanting evidence is a perversion of your circumstances, so you know that really if you, if you buy this thing in the bag that you keep and that I haven't shown you, you're that redounds to your credit, right, uh, it's just notIt's true because the experiential core of these religions, I'm talking about experiences like unconditional love, they say. can be experienced, I mean, it's not that everything in our religious literature is false, but there is nothing that should be believed without enough evidence to be explored, so what I recommend here is that we really adopt a scientific attitude everywhere, Let's not divide our thinking about reality where we say, well, here are the things here where super. important, but we can't think about it too rigorously, right, in fact, to think about it too rigorously is to corrupt it and then here we have, you know, science and technology, and you know, engineers calculating whether a bridge is going to, already You know. bear the weight of the traffic on it and then we can think rigorously so that you know, don't talk to me rigorously about the meaning and you know why it is worth living and why it is worth dying and you know what love and compassion are and well-being is all it has to be, we simply have to be hostage to a conversation our ancestors had 2000 years ago and we have to imagine that some of our books were dictated by the creator of the universe to organize everything. that, but here we're going to fix it all because we really care about how our smartphones work properly, it doesn't make sense, it's trying to resolve that tension, it's something I've spent a lot of time on, it's interesting.

For me, that tension exists and it makes me think again: why doesn't that tension exist in my own life and in the organizing principle that I use and I think a lot about what someone would transmit to their children now? I've decided not to have children, so I can never answer this, but I spent a lot of time thinking about what the organizing principles are that you've referred to as a kind of operating system of the mind, and that seems very appropriate to me. So what are the organizing principles that you would give to someone to think a certain way and one of the things that I'm obsessed with and I think I explain it so poorly that I don't see it lighting up people's eyes and I would love to.

To discover how to say it well, what are these skills that are useful. What I mean by that is that learning architecture is interesting because it allows you to build a structure that could protect someone. It allows you to build a structure that really makes it basic. I don't remember exactly what country it's in, but the seed vault is like you understand the architecture pretty well and how to ventilate things and all the things that the seeds would like to live for a long time so we could replant if we had to learn. those skills had a purpose and that purpose allows something to happen, so let's take Brazilian jiu jitsu, which I know you do jiu jitsu, everything you learn in jiu jitsu has a real world implication and that real world implication is one if you have In a fight, you will probably be more likely to be able to defend yourself successfully and that in itself is so profound that it is worth the time.

Obviously, there are all kinds of other benefits too, but once people understand, okay, these. Skills have utility, so I need to be diabolical about increasing my skill set because it has this real world application, so the problem I get into is people being dogmatic about anything, whether it's religion or as if I wrote this belief system. Well, it was the 25 things. What I had to do in my mind to go from being a good employee, which I always lovingly refer to as a kind of slave mentality, I kept my head down, worked as little as possible and avoided punishment at all costs, there it is where I started, that's what my parents taught me to do and to get out of that and become an entrepreneur.

There were very simple things that could be written down and I had to choose and believe and act on them, and if you came to me and said Hi Tom, by the way, number 14 on your list doesn't make sense and it doesn't make sense. For this reason, I think you misunderstood something about your own journey. I would say that's great because now you're giving me something. That is more useful than what I have used so far. Why do you think that breaks down what people value most? There's something internal and then what process can people use to become more aware of what that is? guide their decision making because I think for a lot of people, I don't know if it's just on a feeling level, it's like a limbic thing or, well, I think it's a framing problem, because most of what matters to the people can be considered as a skill, I mean well-being, it is a skill, not suffering unnecessarily, it is a skill that regulates the perception of your emotional life and regulates negative emotions, it is a skill that I saw.

You know I have a meditation app and you know meditation is a skill, it's very useful and I spend a lot of time teaching what is now known as mindfulness meditation and the moment you start practicing mindfulness, which is just By learning to pay close attention to the nature of your experience, you add nothing to your experience. just noticing what it's like to be yourself moment by moment, but in a way that's not reactive, you're not clinging to what's pleasant or pushing away what's unpleasant, I just want to make this concrete and let's say you're afraid of public speaking. , so you're about to go on stage and you feel anxiety, the usual state of someone who doesn't want to have that experience, they're just trying to figure out if it's something you know beforehand, worry about that experience.

I mean, anxiety flares up just thinking about what you have to do, then once you feel the butterflies, you're at war with them, your contract, your mind contracts around them, your self-talk is unhappy, it's like why the I'm this person who just doesn't like seeing people do this all the time they're chill, I'm not happy, you know when it's me and you, you're talking to yourself, don't you realize? because thoughts just arise behind you as fast as they can and they seem to be you, right? You are identified with every thought that emerges into consciousness and most people live their lives as if there is no alternative.

We have been given a rule book on how to properly operate the human mind and there is no place in a normal education where we are where it is even stated that there is an alternative here and so we reach adulthood, more or less assuming that we will always have the minds that we have and that actually exists, you know, the only thing we can do to really update our firmware is just add new content, you know, we can read books, we can develop interests, but there's nothing at the kind of root level of our emotional and cognitive life that can change and therefore mindfulness is a way to sink a little lower and realize that in this case, if you feel anxiety, there is actually a place from which you can feel do it. well and be truly indifferent to that or anything else you may feel.

I mean, just notice that there is even an unpleasant feeling. I mean, first you may notice that anxiety isn't even that unpleasant; it is so close to arousal in its actual physiology. that really the difference between excitement and anxiety is pretty much just the framing it's just the story you're telling yourself you know if you felt these tingles and this slightly adrenalized response right before you knew you're about to go on a roller coaster , that's part of why you go on the roller coaster. You like that experience, but the fact that you feel that way when you're about to have an interview or you're about to go on stage.

That's intolerable, so just stepping back and realizing the power of framing is again, this is a pretty esoteric skill, but now you know that a lot of people are learning it, you know the secrets and it has immense utility because then you can realize that The half-life of negative emotions is incredibly short. That is, you can be psychologically free even in their presence. Your freedom and well-being are not even based on getting rid of physiology. it may still be there, but if you're not continually thinking about all the reasons why you should be anxious, the physiology dissipates very, very quickly and that's true for anger, it's true for anything that's classically negative, so Let's go back to your question.

A lot of the things that people think they want out of life, or they think are ours, or a lot of the ways that they keep track of how good their lives are or aren't, they don't look like these are you. I know that this experience is given to them based on skills that they have or skills that they never thought to properly acquire, and yes, that is something that would add to the picture of the usefulness of the skills that I want. Talk about the emotional control you mention. I think that's super powerful when my wife and I first got married.

My problem was that it had a very slow or very long fuse, so it takes a lot to get me angry and that was really it. a big complaint of hers she would be very upset if something happened someone got in front of us in line and I wouldn't be scared and she wanted me to be scared and she wanted me to just enjoy how unfair it was and she was really sorry about that and It seemed very strange to me, but then when I got angry, I was still angry and there were times when I was still angry for 8, 10, 12 hours and I was working a lot at the beginning of our relationship, the only time.

What we really had together as husband and wife would be for part of a Saturday and inevitably she would say something that would upset me, I would get angry and I would stay angry the whole time, but then like you said, once you stop reinforcing it which I would unfortunately be reinforcing. reinforcing and reinforcing then something would happen it would change my neurochemistry I would forget why I was so angry every time I thought why I just wasted that time getting angry so I ended up writing this letter to myself and gave it to my wife and told her to read it to me next time time I got angry and in the letter I said "hey, it's me." I have no hidden agenda here as to why I want you to do it.

calm

down apart from the fact that you know that if you end up angry for several hours you will regret it every time and right now I want you to laugh out loud and for as long as it takes, just laugh out loud.

I know that studies show that you can't laugh out loud and stay angry, so I gave it to her, I got angry, she read it, she only had to read it once, it was so deeply transformative to see that just by laughing out loud she could do it. I don't stay angry because she really helped me control my emotions to know that I can do what I will call a change of state. I don't think I've ever heard you use that kind of language, but if I'm angry I choose to stay angry, yes, unfortunately I hadn't found meditation at the time, so I had to use brute force to

achieve

it.

What can people do to learn to control their emotions? The first thing we need to realize is that they already have control over virtually anyone who sees this, I hope they can do this under certain circumstances, so the only example I want you to remember is that I'm sure this has happened to almost everyone . You are in some state like that. You are angry, something has triggered you, but then the phone rings and someone calls you who is not someone to process your anger with. This is like a business call or you have to do it. works correctly and actually interrupts your state perfectly, you can actually just restart and have the conversation and the physiology dissipates very, very quickly, there your attention is on something else and you just have to function now, of course, if someone is a friend. or your mother or someone you can complain to, then you will jump in and amplify this state because you will have a reason to talk about it, so you can interrupt these states and just put your attention on something else and then you know and then one thing dissipates that, uh, I'm really curious to know that you seem incredibly educated on a lot of topics, what is your process for learning, how do you take data, how do you get started?

Do you pull the threads? Which thread do you pull first? If you like it, how do you really start educating yourself on a certain topic? Well, I don't really have, uh, I mean, I take in a lot of information and I always have it. So you already know that, and not necessarily in an efficient or intelligent way. I mean, I don't have any life hacks that optimize me as a consumer of information, so you say you know there are recommended ways to read. a book to extract actionable information as quickly as possible. I've never adopted any of those ways, so, as you know, we still do it.

I basically read everything at the same speed. I read everything like it's writing, so if it's a magazine of people in the waiting room of a dentist's office, I'm reading it at the same speed as I read, you know, a work of philosophy or neuroscience and the big change. lately I mean, you know, I guess this probably happened about 10 years ago, it's just that once I realized that there's functionally an infinite amount of information to consume, you know it's doubling in the sciences every three to five years and you know there are literally thousands of good onesbooks I wish I had read but will never be able to read.

I've become a very fickle reader in the sense that, you know, I cut my losses too early, the sunk cost. The fallacy has completely disappeared for me, the idea that, you know, I spent five hours or five days on this, so I better finish it right, that used to be my orientation regarding reading books. Now I'll throw out a book uh, you know, just on a whim because I know there's an infinite amount of things that I want to read, you know, I don't go into the table of contents and look at the structure of the book and then go to the index and then look. in the topics and then I mean, I just start on page one and I start reading and then when I get bored I stop, you know, and that's, you know, do it, do it with that life hack, what you want, but I do it all the time.

I mean, I'm listening to audiobooks or podcasts or the news when I'm working out or commuting to work or you know, I'm just, you know, constantly absorbing information that you know pretty passively when I'm multitasking, so there's you don't know, I mean because the only thing I don't have a lot of in my life is music because you know I can't write music, certainly, about music with lyrics, I can't do music podcasts, obviously, uh, and I. I've decided that there are so many things that interest me, there are so many things that I want to know, that I basically listen to music by accident, now I mean, I like if someone else is playing music or if I walk into a store there's music. associated with the movie it's coming into, but otherwise I'm just, you know, I'm just a firehose of information pointed at my head most of the time, yeah, I get it, so despite the way coincidence that you are reading.

It seems, at least from the outside, that you are trying hard. I would say that really excellence helped me reconcile, so one of the things that I struggled with with meditation was that I felt decidedly feminine and in a way that, as someone who felt, I felt that Certainly, growing up, I was very much more into the feminine side of being a man than anything else, so for me, my journey towards being an entrepreneur was one of toughening up, um, and anything that made me feel like I was an old school type. in a gentle way I would back away and that's why I didn't meditate for a long time but I see you you're doing Brazilian jiu jitsu you're someone who obviously cares about martial arts and being able to fight and defend yourself.

I have heard you speak very eloquently about violence and clearly in your professional life even what you have done in writing, let alone speaking, you have already achieved such massive success, I refused to believe that there was not a There is a huge amount of energy behind that, so how do you think about meditation in that context? It's like going to war with your mind and you're going to come out on the other side facing demons, uh, and having won some kind of victory that allows me to perform at a higher level or am I completely missing out on all of this and it has to be a letting go, a kind of more peaceful and relaxed transitional experience, yes, well, at first it is a very common association, I totally understand it and it presents itself.

In a lot of ways, yeah, under that framework you can feel the testosterone leaving your body, you know, so, yeah, that's not my orientation, it's a lot like jiu-jitsu for the mind and it's a lot like, I mean, what? is that? The great thing about jiu jitsu in particular is that you can have this massive effect on mastering violence while being relaxed. It is what aikido is advertised as, but it is much more, at least in my opinion, a much more effective version. From that same underlying ethic that you can like, you can control someone and use as little violence as necessary and basically just use superior knowledge of physics and leverage and position against them, so it can be incredibly relaxed and, without However, given.

What is the circumstance? It can be an experience with very high testosterone levels. You know it's not an essentially masculine thing, but you can internalize the same kind of structure and that's very much what meditation is because basically the default state is one of being attacked and ambushed all the time by your thoughts and by your reactivity and by uh you are being deceived by assumptions and illusions and not knowing just that you are in a fog, not you personally, but you know that one is and um you I know that even when you learn to meditate you are in this fog most of the time, I want say, and you're cut, so the practice is to continually break the spell, you were constantly on the mat and you were constantly in a position of surprising disadvantage. right, it's like suddenly there's a rear-naked choke, you know, three quarters were applied, right, and you need an answer for that and not knowing the answer is just synonymous with death, right, it's like you're understanding what You know.

You are just, you will be so miserable as long as circumstances dictate in the absence of this and I shudder to interrupt this because I find it very interesting to link it to bjj, but I need to know why it is like this or I want to say why the eye identification or these thoughts endless why you believe well it's just that the ego is deep down is itself a kind of contraction, I mean, when you look at what you have, this feeling of yourself is right, so let's talk about what the sense of oneself. The sense of self for most of us is not a feeling that we are identical to our bodies.

Most people do not feel identical to their physical bodies, they feel that they are identical. They are passengers inside their bodies, they like my body to be down here as if these were my hands, these are my legs. You know, I obviously care about these things. You know, if you know, you know these were my pains and pleasures, but I. I'm here in the head and I'm kind of a passenger, I'm a witness to this and if you look, I mean most people, when they try to pay attention, they try to find themselves, they try to know, they try to meditate.

They feel like they are a lobster that draws attention to the head, behind the face, behind the eyes, you know, looking at the world and the world is not me, you know, you are, you are there, I am looking at you through space. I'm here behind my face and my face is a kind of mask, I really mean, it's like it's not identical to my face, I mean, its states matter to me, like I have some strange expression on my face, you know? Someone said, "Well, can we take your picture?" and you don't know how to smile and you feel tense as if you were reading the state of your face while your emotions play on your face, right in the signature of the The emotion you feel has a lot to do with what you feel on your face, and it feeds back. in your mind, if you force yourself to smile, you can really feel a state of happiness in your mind, but people feel like they are behind your face in your head, and so you know a kind of homunculus, that person in your head that we know doesn't make any sense neurologically, there's no place in the brain where there could be a little bit, you know. consciousness that is one thing that is this stable self that looks through the eyes, there is a flow of experience and you know that it is invoking, you know many regions of the brain at all times and there is no you, you are identical to this flow of Experience this , the stream of consciousness is what you are as a matter of subjectivity, right, no, I'm not saying that it's not a horizon in the brain or that bodies are not real or that there is no physical universe. as a matter of experience, there is just this stream of consciousness and its content and yet we seem to put this immutable center on it and that's what that, you know what is giving us that feeling that there is an immutable center.

The center of this flow is this type of contracted identification with thought. It is a type of thinking. It's just that at every moment you know if I'm saying something and it doesn't make sense or it sounds like part of it. the experience in you that says oh, that's not right, that feels like you're right, I mean you're not, you're not witnessing it as an object and consciousness just arises and disappears, it has sort of arisen. from behind and it just feels like that's me, but that thing is always happening, that's me, the feeling is always happening and then you feel like it's in your head behind your face, well, for two reasons, there are two sides of this coin, much of what we are thinking about is making us miserable, right, much of this is unpleasant, much of this is causing anxiety, we got you, look at your to-do list, you have 50 things In it, you just feel like, oh God, this is the day.

It's not long enough, right, this is the state and that's good, you know, it's a high-class problem, I mean, you know there are worse problems, this is the state we're in and the obverse of that. is when we are truly connecting with life in a joyful, creative, beautiful way, like when you look out the window and it's the most beautiful sunset ever and you're just looking at the sunset, but you're not like If you were completely connected to It's beautiful, those are all moments when you are losing your sense of self, but the difference between meditation and those moments is that you are not really aware of losing your sense of self, in those moments you are not really aware of what it is. free myself from those moments and you can't do it in other circumstances like you don't like knowing that I need the beautiful sunset just looking at your shoe, isn't that good enough for me?

But with meditation I can do it. Look at your shoe the same way I look at the sunset, so that's what happens to people, most people are waiting for the world to give them a good enough reason to just be present and be present. . so completely that they lose their sense of self, that they're no longer behind them, you know, they're just waiting for something good to happen or they figure out how to change the experience enough that they can again stop, they're gone. at war I mean we are to a greater or lesser degree we are always at war I mean we are always fighting something you know there is always this like you know you are always noticing something wrong you feel uncomfortable in your body you are reacting to something that someone did or you thought they did you are going through a social encounter that seems out of place you know it's awkward and like you're trying to figure out what to say and that sounded stupid and like you're you're just being dragged along and the times when you really feel good are times when you can be there's no break right where it's not about the past or the future you know it's not even about it's not about half a second ago it's not about half a second from now and the ultimate version of that is ju involves abandoning this sense of self is everything you do to flourish for you unfortunately no, I mean, you know, I mean Wisdom would be really being able to track what's going to matter, you know, at the end of the day or at the end of a life.

For me, flourishing is a matter of spending time in a pleasant, happy, creative and fun way, but in all ways. ways in which in each moment when someone asks you well you know that last hour that last day that last week that last year do you feel good about that was a good use of your time that reminding yourself that retrospective gesture that is why that people care? things like the right meaning, I mean, that's like that, it's like there's two that I want to use, you know, Danny Kahneman's framework here is the experiencing self and the remembering self and the remembering self is the self with the one you're talking about when you say you know if you're satisfied with your life, whether you ask yourself or someone asks you, and the answers that are available in those moments really determine whether or not someone has a type of satisfaction. with global life, if it has meaning and that's the those are the moments when people feel like you know I need religion, I need to know, you know, I need to know what the distant future is going to be like, I need a story to tell myself that be fundamentally comforting, but let me experience, the ex, the self that goes moment by moment feeling pain and pleasure and, uh, just dealing with this, the very short time horizon, you know, uh, I think that's fundamentally our self. real, I mean, the me that remembers is the is a version of that, you know, if you ask me, are you satisfied with your life?

And I, you know, spend the next 30 seconds telling you that. That's another short chapter of my personal experience and most of life is a story. This is what you know, it's being summed up in this lifeline of the experience itself and its questions about meaning and a sort of overarching story to tell yourself about what this is all about, are much less important than you think. that people think, I mean, I think you. you want to play both games intelligently you don't want to get absorbed in pleasures that every time you think about your life it makes you feel god, I'm wasting my life you just know I'm a superficial guy you know, you know I got rich and now you just know that I consume heroin and gamegolf correctly and it's just fun.

You know, every time you talk to me I feel great because I have an unlimited supply of heroin and golf. uh, but you know I really can't. You know I get a little embarrassed every time I have to talk about it, like that's not what you know you want, so here you still want, you want your pleasures to be justified by good relationships and a world that cares your entrances and exits, so you are as you want, you know you want. What are you paying attention to all day long that matters to someone else and we are so deeply social that it is not wrong to want those things, but again, it is possible to acquire a well-being that is deeper than any of those things.

So when you lose one of those things, just when you find out that the thing that you thought people would love, they actually hated, you know, the TV show that you wrote or the novel that you wrote or whatever it was that you put all this into time, you had hope. for this, but your hopes were disappointed, how long will you suffer for that right in the absence of this kind of superpower that where you can really find a well-being intrinsic to consciousness will be as long as you know that you know it? Bad genes and bad life experiences dictate what's right, it's like you're at the mercy of who you were yesterday and then you met, you know, as a skill, meditation is pretty unique in the sense that you can reset it regardless of what you do. is happening, but again it is not. a reason to become totally immune to your integra, you know the effects you are having on the world and what the world is telling you because ultimately you will spend most of your time sleeping and dreaming, you know that in this state with you.

Be in a conversation with yourself and in a conversation with others, no matter how much you meditate, I mean, you know, I think that ultimately there are people who make you know, quote, completely enlightened and completely break the spell of identifying with thoughts, um, you know. I am not one of those people or certainly not yet and I have experienced this fluctuation, but the fluctuation is so important to my well-being that I figure I can talk about it without hesitation. What do you say to people who The fundamental and deep problem in their life is that they are lost, they have no meaning or purpose, they don't know which direction to go, they are sliding into depression because everything seems so useless, that is something that meeting.

With a lot of people, people randomly stop me and just help me out and I would love to know that you have a very limited window of time with that person. Do you know what you would say in about 60 or 90 seconds? sending them down a path that would actually be helpful, well I would just point out the mechanics, which is what's really happening is they're lost in thought, they're thinking without knowing they're thinking basically. every moment of your waking life is right and the character in that story in this case is depressing or, you know, certainly produces unhappiness.

Now there are two, there are three, at least three possible antidotes for that and you should test them all properly. So if we're talking about clinical depression, it's helpful to say that there's a physiology to this that you know can be driven from below in a way that's not strictly responsive to your thinking, so it will tend to produce depression. Depressive thoughts and thoughts will tend to feed back into the state, but you know, I don't think all forms of depression are just a matter of what a person thinks. In reality, it is better to see it as a type of illness that you know. physiology, so you know, I'm not against antidepressants at all.

I know a lot of people you know got a lot of help from them and I hope we get better in the future and pharmacology is definitely a part of the solution for a lot of people and everything else that is good to do, that people lose their commitment to do in the worst possible time, it has to be done, I mean, you have to step back and push yourself to exercise, socialize, and do. things that you know you might not want to do because they're good for you and they help you know that they break and they can get you out of there, but the normal range of psychological suffering that you know is not clinical depression, but just feeling like you know that life It sucks and you're a failure and there's nothing you know, it's like you're just stuck, it's a story of telling yourself a story that you're thinking and you can become more and more aware of that and interrupt that more and more. more and or and should be and you can continually reframe this and tell yourself a better story, right, you can actually just design, you know you can, you can change the code that you are, that you're, you know, uh, running moment by moment and I mean, ya you know, a very simple one that you know I use and in fact I recently recorded it in a lesson on the app.

You know, just gratitude, just thinking that this is, actually, you know, this particular maneuver. I think it comes from Stoic philosophy. I don't actually get it from Stoic philosophy, but it's this kind of use of negative imagination where you think about all the bad things that haven't happened well to you, so if you're alone you know if you're stuck in traffic driving. to a job that you don't like and are frustrated, you can think of all the things that could happen to you that haven't happened to you, and if any of them happened to you, you would consider your prayers answered yes You could return to this moment as if no you would have been diagnosed with cancer.

You have two little boys who say you want to live to see them grow up and that you could be the guy to find them today. You have two months to live well and you have to do it, so the next two months are spent solving your worldly affairs, right? a profound effect, you can reframe your experience in a way that doesn't actually change anything material about your circumstances and can let the light in and there are many techniques like that that are just a matter of invoking useful concepts and cleverly telling you guys, where you can find them online, the Making Sense podcast is something I spend a lot of time doing my meditation app is on wakingup.com, it's called wakingup and otherwise I'm just my website sam

harris

.org, I'm on Twitter. also sam

harris

org no point, but just enter sam harris and you can see yes, very true, what is the impact that you want to have on the world, well, you know, what I'm doing is trying to engage honestly with interesting ideas and transcendentals, that is, the web, the Venn diagram, I have, you know, I don't think about it much, but when I think about it, you know retrospectively what I've been doing for a long time.

To keep finding the intersection of ideas intellectually interesting, they have to have some connection to science or philosophy or they just have to be the kind of thing that someone would want to think about anyway because they're just cool ideas, kind of artificial. Intelligence, it's very interesting to think about, but it also has enormous consequences, you know it more and more, and if we are wrong, you will know that it will result in our misery, if not extinction, so that is the bull's eye for me. something that's interesting something that has consequences something that understanding the difference between doing it right and doing it wrong is huge, well and that's like that, that's the picture that I continually try to focus my conversations on.

I love it, very good, guys, really. There are some people on this planet who have influenced my thinking more than this man. I hope you immerse yourself in his world and let it expand your own consciousness and discover new things you are capable of if you haven't already. make sure to subscribe and until next time my friends will be legendary take care sam jesus buddy how many times have you robbed the bank? I got the bank the way you mean, like I broke into one and stole the cash four times, wow, and I stole money. practically dozens of times