Welcome to season 4 episode, 81 of the jbp podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, Sam. Harris joined dad on this episode and they had a chance to talk again after a long Hiatus. As most of, you know, or might know, Sam is a philosopher and neuroscientist a New York Times bestselling author. The host of The Making Sense podcast and the creator of waking up a meditation app informed, by Decades of first-hand experience, under various teachers, and traditions, dad and Sam. Discussed, the is off.
At problem. Meaning you can't make claims about how the world ought to be based on what already is they also touched on religion, psychedelics, perception and attention The Waking Up app, which mom has been using for about a year now and more. By the way, if you're tired of me, interrupting this podcast with ads that's how we keep it in production. Visit Jordan be Peterson dot super cast.com to sign up for an ad-free version. It works on all major platforms and it's just $10 a month or a hundred dollars a year.
You also get exclusive access to presale tickets for shows and monthly ask me anything episodes where members submit the questions again. That's at Jordan be Peterson dot. Super cast.com or in the show notes. Please remember to subscribe if you enjoy this kind of content.
Hello everyone. I'm pleased today in a variety of ways to have as my guest. Dr. Sam Harris, who is undoubtedly familiar to many of you watching or listening to this? Sam is a neuroscientist philosopher and author of five New York Times. Bestsellers his work covers a wide range of topics Neuroscience moral philosophy, religion meditation, practice political polarization rationality, but generally focuses.
On are developing understanding of ourselves and how are developing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live his books. Include the end of Faith, the moral landscape Freewill lying and waking up Sam hosts. The popular making sense podcast. There's also the creator of the waking up app, which we're going to talk about a fair bit today. Which offers a modern rational approach to the practice of meditation and an ongoing exploration of what it means.
Means to live a good life. He's practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan Indian Burmese and Western meditation teachers both in the US and abroad. He holds a degree in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in Neuroscience, from UCLA, Savin. I spoke twice few years ago. It's probably four years ago. Now, on his podcast. We got bogged down a bit. The first time trying to agree on a definition of Truth, which
In our defense is not necessarily the easiest thing to come to an agreement on but our second discussion flowed more freely. Then we met twice in front of live audiences of about 3,000 in Vancouver, soon after it, Dublin and then at the O2 in London, those were tremendously exciting events. I believe for both of us and for everyone else involved. And perhaps even for the audience's, where something approximating, nine thousand and eight thousand people respectively, listen to our discussions and
We haven't spoken well for a long time, perhaps not since then, even and I, so I'm very much looking forward to this. And it's a, my first thing I really like to know is what do you make of those events in retrospect? And they attracted a very large crowd, certainly by our standards. And I'd like to know how you look back on that. And what do you think about that?
Well, first, let me say I'm just very happy to see you. And to be speaking with you again. It's really, it's been. I think we spoke once on the phone since those events if I'm not mistaken, but, you know, it's been the years passed quickly or all too slowly depending on what's going on, as you know, and, you know, I've heard about a lot of what you've gone through indirectly and what you put out there publicly and I just, you know, I was, you know, I was worried about you and I'm incredibly gratified to see you.
Re-emerge and connect with your audience and be back. Be back in the game because thanks man. I value your voice. Yeah. Well, it's I'm pretty thrilled to be back and to be able to be talking to people again like this. So let's hope it continues. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know is very interesting because of me, you know, as you know, and as your your fans know you really did kind of come out of nowhere like a on a rocket.
Trajectory, right? So you were somebody. I had never heard of and then all of a sudden you were the most requested person for my from my audience to have on the podcast and then we did that first podcast that you mentioned where we got bogged down on questions of epistemology and which I, you know, I think I haven't listened to it since but I think it was a useful conversation and not taught us going. Yeah. And many people found it. Very valuable. And I, you know, it's just you two either to my advantage or your advantage, people found it valuable.
They heard what they some heard, what they wanted to hear in it, and some some had their minds bent around as as was intended, but people, most people many people certainly felt. It was a kind of failed experiment in conversation and we should try it again. And then we had a much more amicable discussion on my podcast and that planted the seed for these public events. And if memory
Serves we had one event booked in Vancouver and you were still not quite the famous, Jordan Peterson yet. And then in like in the 15 days, it took us to actually get to that event. Your star had risen so quickly that we recognize that in the promoter, recognize that we'd had to book a another event immediately after, you know, so the next night, we so we had two back-to-back events in Vancouver.
And then yeah, those those subsequent events with you were really a lot of fun because we were disagreeing very stridently about fairly existential topics. And by the time we got to London and and Dublin, we had these immense audiences that were were segments and in ways that I had never quite experienced. I've been in front of, you know, my home team audience and I've been in front of a hostile audience, but I've never been in front of it.
Dance where, you know, fully 50% or 60/40 or who, I don't know what the split was at that point. But, you know, thousands of people were on one team, and thousands of people were on another team for questions of God and faith and meaning. And yeah, but everybody was on board for the discussion. You remember one thing that happened, this was in Vancouver. We were going to switch to a Q&A and we asked the audience essentially, if they wanted the discussion to continue because we were in the middle of it, or if they want it to switch to the Q&A and was over.
Whelming support of the audience for the discussion to continue which I thought was quite remarkable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it was it was a lot of fun and the, which is a tremendous amount of energy and me to have eight or nine thousand people show up for a intellectual discussion. Really, May. Well, there's it did have the character somewhat of a debate but it was not framed as anything like a formal debate. And we were really just having a conversation and agreeing where we agreed and disagreeing where we disagree.
Great, and it was anyway, I found it to be a lot of fun and does dick. Uselessly exciting. Yeah, I'm people people loved it. So yeah, I've yes. And so what do you make of that? It's like why in the world was what it was that we were talking about attractive to so many thousands of people.
Well, you know when you look at the full sweep of what we cover, I mean in those particular conversations, we weren't focusing on areas that we agree about much more. I mean, you know, you and I have where you're going to turn us loose on questions of in a moral Panic around identity politics and social justice hysteria in the you. And I will agree. I think probably ninety percent or more on many of those topics. And I don't recall us.
Jean any of that. But that but that was in the in the background it was certainly it was certainly the wind in your sails, you know, making you more and more prominent at that point because you had hit those topics so hard. But you know the topics we were touching questions of of we know what is reality and how we should live within it really, you know, that the fundamental questions of of what it means to live a good life. What are the requisites for living a good?
Good life. 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. Right? I need it. If the, if the wolf is at the door in the room. Well, then people really for the most part, don't have the luxury of worrying about whether they're as ethical or is honest, or is profoundly engaged with the
The present moment as they might be. But once you get to something like, you know, first world concerns where you have enough material abundance, where you're, you know, survival is not a question. And when political stability is sufficient that you're not continually worried that, you know, your neighbors are going to murder you. Then you're then it really. I mean then then we, you know, when you when you when you wake up.
Up at three in the morning and can't get back to sleep. You're thinking about what what does this all mean? And what's you know, what is a good life? One of the things that we did agree on I think that sort of provided a container for the discussions in total was that there was potentially such a thing as the good life that that's just not some, you know, Epi phenomenal abstraction or something like that but something Central and to some degree, I think.
disagreed about
where the information for deriving, what might constitute The Good Life comes from but it isn't even clear to me. Exactly. Where are those differences lie, and that was part of I suppose the fun of the discussion and something that I also hope to continue today because I've seen since then it seems to me that you've turned your attention more and more perhaps not more and more. But you certainly continued your route into investigation of what constitutes the good life and
And also your attempts to bring what you've learned to unencrypt perhaps an increasingly wide audience using the technology that you're using. Now I have this app that you have, which is the waking up app. My wife has subscribed to that for the last year and a half and I joked with you earlier that she probably spent more time with you than she has with me in the last year and a half. So that's quite quite comical. But she finds, it's quite useful. And, and I took a good look at it today. How does tell me about that?
Tap and why you're doing that. Are you doing that instead of writing a book or is it another book? And why are you doing that? Well, I seem to be doing everything instead of writing a book. They're all writing a book is has become an opportunity cost. I can't justify the moment, but no doubt. I will write another book at some point. But yeah, between my podcast and app. That's really that those are the two channels where I'm putting out my ideas at this point. So why did you switch to that? Because, well, I looked at the app and one of the things
Doing, is you've broken down lectures? In some sense into like 10 minute chunks that are focused on different topics, a whole variety of topics. I've got the app right here and zooming, my phone. So there's groups of lectures. Fundamentals, mind and emotion the illusory self Mysteries and paradoxes. And some of the topics, for example, in the illusory, self, self and other alone with others, looking in the mirror, The Art of Doing Nothing.
Mysteries and paradoxes. What is real Consciousness? The mystery of being in some ways, it looks like a book, right? It's got chapters. It's got subchapters. But why why this? Why this technology? And, and how is it performed for you in comparison to a book? Well, so, I did write the book version of this content, or certainly most of this content. So, I have a book waking up and it touches, you know, it is my attempt to ground so called
Spiritual experience experience is like self Transcendence and unconditional love and the kinds of things people experience on various psychedelics, you know, there's all of increasing interest to people. Now, I wanted to ground all of that in what I consider to be a rational empirical understanding of the world, right? I didn't want to believe anything on insufficient evidence. So as to prop up the importance of these experiences because they don't, they don't actually need to be.
Propped up by by in my view Faith or any unjustified claim to knowledge and they do it very interesting points deliver their own. Kind of knowledge about the nature of the mind and there are things you can recognize directly in your experience. That puts your understanding of your own subjectivity in closer. Register with what we understand about the brain right now, not everything is can be can be
Cashed out experientially, but many things can and can I, can I ask you one question? Well, I okay. So that's there's a bunch of that that I agree with deeply and one of the things I've tried to do to the degree that it was possible. When talking about, let's say matters, that could be religious. I've tried to stay out of the religious territory as much as possible because it seems to me counterproductive to make an appeal to Faith. Would you can make an appeal to
What would you do? It? Not just to experience. It's deeper than that, to something like the combination of experience in science. So, let me run something by you, as an example, and see what you think of this. Because one of the things that we really sparked about I suppose, or discussed was the is ought conundrum, right? Where we agree that you have to have Arts because you have to act and that's that landscape of value, but we ran into some trouble. I think trying to
Make our viewpoints about where those oughts might be derived from you seem to be more convinced than me. Perhaps that the step from is to ought was simpler and I was more convinced that it was more complicated and there were problems that still remain there. I'll let you respond to that. But I wanted to talk about this deeper experience. So I was standing with my wife, the other day, on the dock of this Cottage, we have up north and it's very dark up here. And so when you look up, you
You can see the night sky, well enough to see the Milky Way and actually to see galaxies if you use the corner of your eye and and so and one of the things that's associated with that is an experience of awe and it's not surprising because they're you are confronting what's essentially infinite as far as you're concerned is as much as it might be for us. And I thought a lot about the experience of all, one of the things and it's also produced by music, quite regularly. One of the things that happens when you
It saw, is that of this digital pile erection mechanism kicks in and that's the mechanism that makes prey animals. Puff up. You see this with cats. They're quite funny when they do this, they puff up. So they look bigger in in when they catch sight of a threatening predator. And so they perhaps objectively experiencing experience the more terror-stricken end of aw, but that all is very,
Very deep. It's not. It's not a rational response. Its way underneath rational, and it's an instinctual response, and it seems to me as well that it's Associated. Very tightly, with our instinct to imitate, and it's strange to think that you could look at the night sky, and that could catalyze a in an instinct imitate, but we're very, we're very good at using abstraction us creatures and it's not exactly obvious what we can imitate. And what we can't
So I think that's an example of this idea that you're putting forward, that the domain of religious experience. Let's say your spiritual experience has a biological underpinning. A deep biological underpinning. And part of my question is, what's the, what are the implications of that? Exactly if that, if that happens to be the case. So first, I'd like to know if you agree about that discussion about oh and is a not thing.
And then anything else you'd like to add? I'd like to hear. Yeah, we've opened many doors there. That's I see of ten our conversation tree and just those topics but we'll just start with the izzat bit. Maybe you're in very good company. Most people in science and philosophy. As you know, believe there really is a a disjunction between is and.and to follow. Humes really cast, aside remarks. I mean, he didn't go into a deeply but but at one point,
He wrote that, you can't derive an audit from it is, right. There's no description of the way the world is. They can tell you how it ought to be. So and he was, he was decrying the fact that so many scholars and in general. So many theologians in his time would move smoothly from is to ought without acknowledging that they had had committed a logical error.
But I do think there's a trick of language lurking at the bottom of, this is an odd talk that is misleading and and it's it's difficult to spot and, you know, I believe I've spotted it and, and, but I do know the people who don't agree with me. Don't agree with me that when their intuitions don't pass through, you know, the point where I'm trying to shove them and, you know, it's somewhat analogous to the philosopher vidkun Steen made a point when he was criticizing.
Freud, he was criticizing Freud's notion of the unconscious. He didn't. He thought this reification of the unconscious was was fallacious and you know, we can leave that aside. I don't, you know, that's I'm not sure I agree with him there. But the point he was making about the power of language was interesting. He said, imagine, if instead of saying I saw nobody in the room, we said, I saw mr. Nobody in the room, imagine a language that forced us to say, I saw mr. Nobody, right?
Just just imagine what confusion would be born of that Convention of language. That's something he said, in his, I think, was in the blue book. And there are many places in our thinking, about the world where language plays a similarly confusing role where we have reified something, which is not probably happens with free will. Yeah. No, so I think it's a confusing. It's confused as about Free Will as confused as about about death, for instance, and I think well, you know, if you're an atheist,
Who doesn't believe that anything happens after you die, right? If you think there's there's no rebirth, you know, there's no reincarnation and that Eastern picture of karma and rebirth is probably not true. And you think there's no heaven or hell. And if you really think you get something like a dial tone, when you die. Well, many people are left expecting some kind of Oblivion, some kind of positive nothingness, some some some permanent loss of experience, where and to this notion of none of Oblivion.
Is a kind of reification, but if you think about it more clearly, that's precisely the kind of thing. You would not accept me if it's simply the end of experience. Well, then you're not going to be experiencing the end of experience, right? This is not you didn't you didn't experience an absence before you were born. Right? Well, the idea that you would experience is implicit in the way. The question is framed. Right? Right, right. It's not was nothing. You're going to suffer me. This is something that epicurus pointed out through.
Lucretius that, you know, death is nothing for us. You know, we're we are death is not and where death is, we are not right? Like there's just there's non overlapping sets of facts whatever those facts are. If in fact, death is the end of experience. So which is to say there's nothing to worry about, really, if, if death is, is just the end of anything. And so, how do you think that relates? Is odd Paso to come back? To is a not, I just think,
Really what we have me. Forget about morality forget about questions of Good and Evil, forget about any value judgment, what? I and try to return your mind to something like the Primal circumstance of Consciousness, right? I mean, just to just imagine waking up from, you know, a 100-year sleep and you forgotten everything about yourself. And now you're just a mind in a world.
In some sense were all and we're all potentially in that position in every moment in our lives, you know, just seeing creation a fresh right seeing this moment of seeing hearing smelling tasting touching thinking for, you know, as though for the first time, you know, clearly it did you know that? Have you ever heard of the neurological case, I think it was a man who had bilateral hippocampal damage. He was in the psychiatric. Yeah, it'll end. He woke up like that every second.
Yeah, well, I put my wife would come in the room and he'd say, it's as if it's, as if I'm seeing you for the first time, he lost that, right. He lost the imposition of memory on his perception. And so every perception was fresh and new. Yeah. Well, so and I'm not recommending brain-damaged anyone as a way of freshening up experience, but there's a there's a non neurologically compromised way of grasping, this intuition, which is just in this moment, you know.
Experience really is potentially totally fresh and totally new and it. But for the fact, there's this, there's this ever-present layer of our thinking about it are rememb remembering what just happened are expecting. The next thing that's going to happen. That's really the conversation. We're having with ourselves in each moment and 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
Just a viewing everything through your Concepts and your discursiveness. That's a neurologically justifiable Viewpoint to because it looks like the hippocampal map, that more or less keeps track of in some sense, our memories and then also of our conditional positioning in the world is likely either. It's inhibiting that more Primal perception. Although it's doing it in a very useful manner. Generally speaking because it keeps us oriented enough in
Moment. So that we focus on minut, the minut details, that might be necessary to our survival, but it's it's conceivable that it's simultaneously blinding to blinding us to a broader and deeper reality. That in some sense is deeply nourishing in the face of suffering. Yeah. Yeah, and and what's more the the mechanism that is tiling over reality with Concepts and every moment and keeping us thinking and perseverating.
In about our experience rather than recognizing that we're identical to our experience. Let's table this part of the discussion for a second. But this would go under the question of. What is the self, you know, what do we mean by self and what might transmit self-transcendence be? But this whole mechanism is productive of most, if not all of our psychological suffering right there. Like there's just, you know, all of our anxiety and depression, and fear, and regret and shame and and
An inability to love, even the people. We ostensibly love, you know, in our lives, you know, the contraction into self. That is so toxic so much of the time, you know, all of our deferring, our happiness, to some future time where we've met all of these goals that, that raised our status in comparison with that, you know, everyone else. We're comparing ourselves to that whole stratum of being a person is a confection of endless.
Leslie 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, you know, using psychedelics or practicing meditation, or just having you just a collision with the present moment, that's engineered by something. You know, you're someone Close to You dies or so, you know something, something changes it can do that. Yeah, I can do that. And dance can do that or, you know, in certain cases the, you know, the all you described looking at, looking up at the Milky Way, right? I mean that that can do that for.
4K. So let me let my brother. I just I just didn't answer. You didn't answer your question the this.
This notion that there's, there's the separation between facts and values, right? Doesn't doesn't run through when you, when you think of what this Primal circumstances, like, where you have to figure out how you will, when you have to make sense of the world. You have to, you have to try to understand what is going on in the world. And you have to most importantly, have to figure out what to do next. Right? Yeah. So I've you so you can forget about morality forget about
Lions forget about anything for the moment and just recognize that the world is such that we are confronted with a ever-present navigation problem. We have this the possibility of navigating both personally and collectively to places in the space of all possible experience that are just manifestly terrible, you know, and and the worst place I call the worst possible misery for everyone, right? So it is possible to
Imagine a universe where every conscious system suffers as much as it possibly can for as long as it can, you know, some some version of the perfect hell, right, and then there's been as possible to recognize that whatever you want to call it with you, whether you want to use words like good and evil or right and wrong or not. Every other plays on the what I call the moral landscape is better than the worst possible misery for. Yeah, right. I agree with that completely, that that's why I studied.
D for so long because I figured if I could find out what the worst thing was that would be a pointer to the best thing because if you know the worst thing, then the opposite of that is the best thing. Whatever that is. It doesn't mean you have to proposition lies it it's not even that easy to do and there may be many opposites of that. It may not just be one best possible place on the landscape, there could be many Peaks and valleys on the more landscape and there could be Peaks that are not equivalent in anything but the
Fact that they are equally distant from the worst possible misery for everyone, right? So they could be. So I'm not, you know, this descent can sound like moral relativism, but it's not, it's an objective picture away morality, think it does. But it's just to say that there are, there may be, there may be very different ways of living, we're given the given the right kind of Minds involved, you could be happy and very strange ways and in ways that, you know, would be counterintuitive for, you know, Apes like ourselves.
But nonetheless, they could be very far from the worst possible misery for everyone. So any case I call this a bit soon. So whatever you want to call navigating in this space moving away from just unendurable pointless misery, right toward, you know, Beauty and creativity and joy and love and in all of the good stuff. We recognize. And again, there's there's there's no we haven't seen the Horizon of this. We have no idea how beautiful life could be for.
For Minds like our own or more Minds, you know, significantly, more sensitive and creative and intelligent than our own. I mean, there's no other vision of Heaven as a place. That was perfect where everyone that was in. It was striving to make it better. Right? Right. Yeah. So there's there's some we don't know how good things can get and we don't know how bad things can get. But we know they can get quite terrible from where our current vantage point, and we know they can get quite wonderful from our current vantage point, and
This is where the distance between facts and values collapses for me. There are right. Let me ask you just land this final sentence. There. There are right and wrong answers, with respect to how to navigate in this space, right though. They're there is, it is, and they're right and wrong, whether we've discovered them or not. Right? We could all be wrong about that thing. We should do next. So as to be as happy as possible, you know, we could be, we could think we're
Doing something very wise and compassionate and useful and actually where you know slowly poisoning ourselves with some, you know, toxin that we haven't identified. Right. It's so there are things. So it is truly possible to not know what you don't know. Is truly possible to not know what you're missing rights for their, they be a, some happier place on the landscape that you could get to. If only you knew to try to get to it, but you're not trying to get to it because you're satisfied, you know, drinking 12 Beers a night.
And, you know, cheating on your wife or whatever it is. You could have a whole civilization. That is unaware of just a local Peak. Yeah, exactly. Great one to local Peak. But yes, not as good as it might be
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So there are two ways to see that this, in my view that this, this disconnection between facts and values. Collapses, first. You need to you need to Value certain things in order to get any facts in hand in the first place. Any statement about facts, relies on having first valued things like evidence and logical coherence, right? If you're if you don't value logic, there's no logic.
Argument. You can give someone to say that they should value. If someone doesn't value evidence. There's no evidence. You could give them to say that they should value it. So that it so it, you know, epistemology sort of bites, its own tail, or put our picks himself up from it's bright and all that. Actually, that actually Harkens back to the is ought problem, right? Because right there, you said, and I'm not denying the validity of anything. You've said so far about right there. You said that.
Without agreeing on the validity of evidence. Let's say, hmm. There's no agreement about what is and there. We've got a frame problem there, right? We have that value, that you need to even determine. What is well, the question then is, what where does that value come from? And you can't say, Well, it comes from what is in some easy manner because you just said, but unless you have a value of a certain sort, you can't derive what is, and that's partly why. This ought is is ought problem just doesn't seem to go away. Yeah, but
But it goes away because it goes away. The moment you recognize, there is in principle. Always a mystery at our backs, you know, this is true experientially. I may I say that I would say this is true experientially with respect to the nature of Consciousness, but it's true. Conceptually with there's with respect to even those fields that pretend to be most directly in contact with the nature of reality and it's even physics. You know, when you're talking about the most rudimentary laws of physics, right there is
Still, there has to be a first brute fact, or a brute Axiom that you accept that. Doesn't that need not prove itself. Right? Is there's no self-justifying epistemology. Yes. Well that exact. Yes. I believe that while. I think that that's why there is an emphasis on faith in some principle in So Many religious Traditions, is that there is a starting place there and you're trying to flesh out where that is at least to some degree. So let me
Kill a couple of that mention one thing and then ask you a couple more things. So
This is ought, distinction is even more peculiar when you look deep into the Neuroscience of perception. Okay. So one of the most influential books I ever read was an ecologically approach to visual perception and it's a classic text on perception and a very sophisticated one, and I don't think it what has no pretensions to mysticism of any sort. And so, that's kind of interesting given the conclusion and the conclusion of the author.
Is that what we see? Aren't facts or objects. We see meanings. So, for example, a six-month-old who crawls towards a visual Cliff, which is a plate of glass stretched over a or placed over a falling off. Place. Assam. The six-month-old will stop. He won't crawl seven months. I don't remember the exact and she won't crawl across that piece of glass, right? He doesn't
See cliff and infer, falling off place. He sees falling off place and there's a condition called neglect which is characteristic of certain people who have pre frontal, lobe damage called. Sorry. It's not neglect. It's called utilization Behavior. Yeah, and these people lose the ability not to act in the presence of a meaningful object. So if they walk down the hall and the door is open, they will go through the door. If you put a cup in front of them, they cannot stop. But pick it.
Because they don't see cop and infer drinking. They see drinking object directly. And so, even that is ought, distinction is, is deceptive in a very fundamental sense because it's predicated on the idea that what we see are meaningless objects and that we lay an overlay of meaning on top of that. And it's not by no means obvious at all that. That's how we see ya. And that's part of the reason why it's been so difficult to make machines that can see an
Act in the real world because the object world is not simple and that value structure that you're describing that over that that value structure, right? That is embedded in all of our perceptions and ways that we are only beginning to understand scientifically. Yeah, there's so many ways in which are, you know, what's called, folks, psychological sense of what our minds do is.
Is just completely broken. When we have it. We have a sense of of the tools. We're using to do anything, you know, that would beliefs desires perceptions expectations, the movement of attention, right? And our sense of what all of this is from. The first person side, has definitely broken apart in. Many respects as we've studied, these things neuro scientifically from, and psychologically, from the third person side.
And understanding ourselves understanding the world and our place within it. And what's possible is inevitably a marriage of those two sides. And you can't, you can't fully banish first-person experience because they're most of what we know about ourselves has a cash value in terms of the experiential side. I mean, there's to take the greatest case. 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. And you can't look at a brain, even a living one and have and form any intuition that it it's a locus of Consciousness, It's Only By correlating changes in the experience of living people with, you know, tools of neuroimaging in this case or things like EEG where we say. Okay. Well the one the brains doing that, there's something that it's like to experience those changes. Right. And that and and
And we pretend rather often to take the third person science side off the gold standard of first-person experience and say, okay. Well, that's really the Mind may be an illusion, you know, maybe even Consciousness is an illusion. What we know is happening. Is that our brains that are processing information, and we've got things like synapses and, and neuromodulators and neurotransmitters. And that's the real stuff, right? That's the reality. This mind part is is some kind of, right? That's it.
Mission is it's not an observation. It's just a tissue of confusion reality, right? That's a big problem. Yeah, there's no, you can't. You can't banish the the the side which is, in fact, cashing out. So many of your claims about the nature of in this case, the brain. And but that's not to say that we can't be deeply mistaken from the first person side about what our minds are doing it. So,
you know, I'm, you know, as you as we've indicated here already. I'm an enormous fan of meditation. I think it's, I think it's indispensable for understanding certain things about the nature of the mind, but you can't even tell that you have a brain by meditating, right much less, you know, what is doing it? So it's like, it's that there are things that you, there were some major blind spots in first-person experience. No matter how you train experience, but you can notice for instance, that
The sense of self the sense that you're a subject, interior to your experience, the theory, kind of a locus of a Consciousness that is appropriate and experience. That is that is an illusion or at best a convention writer, kind of construction that you can cease to construct and so much of it. So why why do you why do you believe that? That's so useful?
All right. There's some Yak or here. Ya know. It's a great question. I want to make I want to make one observation before we go back to shore. So well, one of the things I learned when I was studying. Ancient Egyptian mythology. Was that the Egyptians worshiped Horace. That's the eye. And we may have talked about this before but they weren't worshipping rationality. They weren't worshipping that monkey mind. They were worshiping attention.
Self and they regarded attention as the process that Revitalize dead totalitarianism because they had a God for that. That was Osiris.
And so there's something and when the Egyptians were contemplating what? Constituted proper political sovereignty, they regarded the union of Osiris and Horus as the emblem of proper sovereignty. And that was the, Oh, serious. That was rescued from his totalitarian state by his Union with Horace. So it's like the conceptual World which tends to ossify like, well like,
Didn't of Exodus book and attention process which focuses perhaps on what's outside of that of totalitarian certainty and therefore continues to update it and that's not rationality. And I think it's pointing to something that's similar to what you're fascinated by with your concentration on it. I think it's on attention.
Per se, it's not rationality. It's certainly not, it's not the contents of thought. It's something more like direct apprehension. And, you know, in clinical and clinical practice, Rogers, Carl Rogers, particularly taking a bit of a leaf from Freud, but he said that if you attend to your clients, which meant listen to them, but it meant attend, didn't mean engage them in rational dialogue. It it meant more like, listen.
They will transform psychologically, as a matter. Of
course.
Right.
Yes, I use a tension in a slightly different way or a more specific way and differentiate it from something like Consciousness, or awareness itself. So the like so and this is I think this is a I'm sure they're different ways of using it, but one tends to meet this definition. Now in in cognitive science and Neuroscience where
It's a narrowing of the field of awareness, but there's still a field, or there's or it's like a spotlight within within a larger field. So, for instance, I, you know, I'm looking at you on Zoom now and I can look at a I can look at, you know, one of your eyes, right? I can specifically look at that. I and I can focus on that. But there are many other things that I within my visual field that I'm not focusing on but which are nevertheless there and one of them.
Could suddenly capture my quote attention, right? So I'm looking at your, I'm doing my best to look at your eye to the exclusion of everything else. But if you know, if a mouse ran across my desk, all of a sudden that would have 100% of my attention and that too, is that shift is the shift of the spotlight. That that's the, that's the attentional mechanism that is happening within this larger context of what I would call Consciousness, or awareness because it's, you know, the so you're using attention as the thought. Like, yeah, like the fovea, right?
Exactly. So it's the kind of the cognitive fovea where that's where Consciousness is most intense, right? Because those neurons are each neuron in the fovea is connected to 10,000 neurons in the primary visual cortex. So it's tremendously dense cortically and then so you could think of, maybe we could distinguish these two concepts this way. So at in the center of your vision at the fovea, it's extraordinarily high resolution Consciousness, which we call attention and
And as you move out from the fovea to the periphery your your Consciousness becomes lower and lower resolution until out here. If you're speaking visually, you can't even really count the number of fingers that you see. You can see the hands, only if they move and out here, it's black and white and out here. It's gone. Yeah, high resolution full for your focus, and you can move your eyes to put that high resolution. High neurological Vision to work.
Yeah, I would, I would use the terminology a little differently here though, cuz I wouldn't say that Consciousness is diminishing at the edges. I would say that the visual perception is so, Consciousness is just the fact that anything is being known, right? So you can be conscious for instance of very blurry vision. Writer. You can be conscious that your blunt that you can't see anything. Right? But like if you just close your eyes, now, even your visual Consciousness is just as present. It's just you're just aware of this. Look.
Of the darkness behind your eyelids, right? And it's not even all that dark. There's it's scintillating with vika, various colors. And right. So okay, so we could say that. You've got that high-resolution attention in the middle. Then it gets lower resolution route to here where you can't see. And then that's all contained within a broader attentional field, right? Yes, and I would call that the broadest possible field just Consciousness cocaine or awareness fight. So, the okay. So now we know exactly what we mean by our terms.
So, and so would I would, I would, I would say it's due to your question which I think is a very important question. We know what's the point of examining the self, you know, much less transcending it. There are several points. Me what the main one is that it is the the string upon which all of our suffering is is strong. I mean, it's just, it is just it is what, when you feel as miserable as you can feel that sense of
Being at the center of this torment and like, which is what direction will you find relief? Right? I mean, this is, this is just, this is you've got the cacophony of unpleasant experience. And then you've got this place in the middle of it or a parent place in the middle of it from which you're trying to resist this experience, right? Or figure out trying to figure out how to change it. Right. So let's say you have a terrible pain, you know, somewhere in your body.
You know, there's the pain. There's a strong stimulus of unpleasant sensation, you know, the burning and, and stabbing and twisting feeling. And then there's this reaction to it from. Apparently, some point outside, the pain, very likely, you know, for most people up in the head. I mean, most people feel like they're a subject in their heads that is not do not truly coincident with the rest of their body. They don't feel your most people. For the most part don't feel identical to their
Bodies, they feel like they have bodies and these bodies can misbehave in various ways. And again, so you have a terrible pain, the pains down there. Let's say it's in your knee, you're up here. Now a a hostage being tortured by the misbehavior of the rest of your body, right? And your resistor, you're trying to trying to find some way of resisting, these Sensations, and so it is with emotional distress or unpleasant thoughts, right in.
You can have thoughts that terrorize, you and it, all of it seems to suggest. I mean, this is, you know, this is the extreme case of Stark unhappiness. But even in the best of times, right, even when things are going really well and everything we experience is very smooth and we're getting what we want and the you know, we're we, you know, our favorite treats or just an arm's length away and we're filling our mouths with with gumdrops. Whatever it is. We're
we're gratifying this thing at the center of our experience and it can never be finally gratified because experience itself is impermanent. It's just, you know, it's just you get to the thing you want and you Gorge yourself on it and then not only new thing, you want a new thing. It may be, then you need a drink of water because this lingering taste in your mouth of chocolate, mousse, or whatever it is, is two chlorine and too much, and you got to wash that out, so that you just give me. You wouldn't want to stay in that state, even if you could
And there's some, there's kind of this rolling dissatisfaction, even in satisfaction that we will encounter even in the best of times, right? Even when you literally can get anything more or less anything you want and and yet we know at any moment. It can be subverted by something terrible happening, you know? At any moment. You can suddenly feel like you're you might be having a heart attack, right? And then that becomes the thing that the sense of me in the middle.
All of everything collapses upon, and, and it is, it makes life. I mean, this is again, the sense of being this vulnerable center-right. It makes life that's going to Long, emergency, that can be pacified by increasingly strenuous efforts to control experience, right? We have to control this thing because at any moment is a we're constantly.
Which is if you just look at any moment, we might die. Yeah, you were. We're avoiding death if you know, but even you know, even if for those of us who don't think about death very often, I mean and there are those people we're constantly modifying our experience. So as to avoid discomfort whether it's social discomfort or physical discomfort, or maybe just every every correction in our body that if you do, if you just try to sit still for an hour, you'll notice that all of
The micro adjustments of in posture that you're now no longer making are made because you really don't have to wait long before you feel miserable. I mean your body, the amount of pain you can get just sitting in the most comfortable chair. You can find in your home and just resolving. Not to move is quite extraordinary. It's just you know, it's just there's no position that's comfortable enough that it will be comfortable an hour from now. Okay. So when you when you rise out of that into this mess,
Native state. Well, like what? What's your experience, and what has that done for you personally and ethically, okay. So so the starting point, which I've just dimly sketched out of being a subject in the head, right? I mean, this is something that I will be familiar to 99% of our audience or 99.999% of our audience.
People feel that they are they don't feel like Daniel to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. And now, you know, they might be told okay, you might want to look into this practice of meditation. You might want to just understand yourself a little better here. Start with this practice. You can close your eyes and pay attention to the feeling of breathing, you know, the sensation of breathing in the the rising falling of their chest or the are passing in their nostrils. And every time you get lost in thought, just come back to the raw sensation of breathing. It's a
very basic exercise of you know, what's called mindfulness.
And the moment you try, try to do that, you begin to discover or, you know, some moments down the line you discover that. It's very hard to do that. Your that your default state is to get distracted by a conversation, you're having with yourself and to forget all about this project of paying attention to the present moment and they could be it doesn't matter what it is, but, you know, the breadth and this case. And and so it is, in fact true to say that for most people I mean literally,
99.9 percent of our audience. They couldn't pay attention to the breath for a full minute. Say mmm, even if their lives depended on it rise just like it's simply not in the cards. It's not it's you know, 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. And so that's interesting. Right? What's interesting? Is that despite your best efforts?
You get carried away by thought it helplessly moment after moment. Now being able to break that spell, being able to see thought, as thought it was eventually, once you get some degree of mindfulness in hand, you no longer confined your attention to the breath or any other arbitrary object. You begin to open it up to everything you can possibly experience. So it's just, you know, sights and sounds and Sensations and emotions and
and thoughts themselves can become objects of mindfulness, but when you can, but this is where this is the kind of crew The crucial, you know, almost binary difference which
Which produces an immense amount of psychological benefit, the moment you can really notice thoughts themselves as appearances in Consciousness rather than what you are in each moment, because what happens is in the default case, the thoughts kind of creep up from behind us, in some sense. They kind of come out of nowhere and that just feels like me. Right. So I'm you know, I'm trying to get some reflex of identification. Well, you wouldn't act the damn thing.
Out. If they didn't feel like you, you know, one so they have to have that impulse to action in them. That that's part of felt identity. Right? So, and so, you're saying that you're saying this is part of, I suppose part of the Buddhist tradition. Particularly, although not only that being the puppet of those thoughts is part of what prolongs suffering at least, under some circuits, especially being that happened of them. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's and so this is so but the people, you know, listening to us now.
You can feel this. So, you know, the, you know, we're talking and people are trying to understand the threat of this conversation, but it's that they have a voice in their head. That's competing with this, right? They need other trying to listen to us, but they're also thinking right? In the think it. So they might think what the hell's he talking about? Right? Like, there's some intrusive thought comes in or like. Oh, no, wait a minute. He didn't answer the question that thought that, that feels if you're identified with it, if you don't see it as mirror language.
Appearing in Consciousness or Mirror Image rewrite. It feels like me. If like that is the self. That is a mostly feels like what I believe. Yes. Is that there's no space around, Tristan. Yeah. Well one of the things you do in clinical work all the time, especially in the cognitive behavioral field is, you help people identify those thoughts. In some sense, as
As objects that yes to no longer identify with them and say, you know, just because you think that it's not necessarily true. It's not necessarily you and it's not necessarily helpful right now. We can check and see if any of those three, you know propositions were true. Maybe it is you maybe you do, believe it may be, the is useful, but we're going to start by hypothesizing that some of these automatic thoughts are actually what's driving your misery. And I really
So see that as a tremendous danger of totalitarian ideologies because their thought systems that are almost entirely foreign in some sense to the individual person that invade that cognitive space that you're describing and then manifest themselves as unquestioning identity. And if they're blinding, the person to some underlying reality that's actually revivify dying and nourishing and an antidote to suffering, Then There are a tremendous block to exactly that.
Process. Yeah. Yeah, so there are two levels at which we can address this problem of thought and it's connection to suffering and one is at the level of thought itself. Right? So you can, you can replace bad thoughts with better thoughts, right? You can you can, you can get some, you can triangulate on your, your tendency to have one kind of conversation with yourself and engineer. A better conversation with yourself. Right? And that's you know, than he has in cognitive behavioural therapy like a six-year-old, for example, and start thinking like a
Roll, right, right. And what was more a thirty-year-old that actually has good intentions for you? Right? Like the, you could a friend. That's right. You can make your mind your friend. Yeah. Yeah. Loved one, even. Yes. Yeah, I can imagine that. So, I imagine that. So that's, that's a, that's a totally legitimate way to to climb out of the, the great hole of suffering that people find themselves in. But there's a, there's a more fundamental and I'm not I'm not saying
And you know what? I'm what I'm recommending in terms of meditation mindfulness, here is more fundamental, but it is not is completely compatible with that computer more conceptual discursive layer, right? And some things, I would argue, some things are best addressed on the discursive layer and some things are better addressed on the on the lathe. The more fundamental error. Well, if you know when you're sitting meditating first of all, you were sitting
And
so it's perfectly reasonable to adopt a mode of thought that's healthful and productive in relationship to the fact that you're sitting, you know, those more discursive propositional thoughts that we've been describing, there are higher resolution in some sense and they're more practically implementable. And so there's going you want to get that in order but that doesn't mean that they're that this phenomenon that you're describing. That's outside. The entire discursive structure doesn't exist. Right? It's probably also the place we go at least two.
Some degree when we go to sleep and we dream and get rid of if I'd it's outside that discursive landscape and that's necessary for physiological Rejuvenation.
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You may know I'm working on a book. Hopefully I'll finish it one dreams program effective editing how to take your writing to the next level is very useful for writing here. Are tips straight from one dream that I found. Interesting. If you're stuck, you could try laying your pages down on the floor. Tacking them up on the wall or hanging them up on a clothesline. That gives you a linear perspective. Another tip. It's recommended to save different versions of your manuscript. Dad does this with
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No.
Yeah, well dreams are very interesting because I think they are necessary and we know a lot about the necessity of of REM sleep for health. And so there's no question that the dreams are doing good things for us, but they also are in experience of Stark psychosis. You know, I mean that they are they are a condition. Unless you're unless we're talking about lucid dreaming. This is a circumstance where you really have no idea what's going on. I mean, you are, you are in reality asleep, in your bed and yet you
Transitioned into another experience, which where the laws of nature violated? You're talking to dead people? You're, you know, the sky is the limit, right? And you're not even surprised you're doing. So little reality testing. You're not even surprised about these changes, you have so little purchase on who you were just 15 minutes ago when you went to sleep, that. It's so that does mean. It does mean to some degree at that point though, that you have suspended your unthinking identification, with your daytime.
Additional thought your butt have been in the in the normal case. You're identified with your dream body and your dream Persona and whoever you are. Whoever you've become an Emmy, you're being terrorized in a in a in a more malleable, right? The eyeballs are problem is still there. Yeah. It's just it's it's more random and less logically coherent. There's something there about exploration and change of categories themselves that's going on, but I can see your point about. It's still being
Well, I'll take that bet and more to the point if there's actually a very close connection between what happens with ordinary thought and dreaming. So for instance.
Ordinary thinking is it to in my view ordinary identification with thought. I'm not, I don't mean to demonize thought per se because what we need thoughts. And and the goal of meditation is not to get rid of thoughts, is to be able to recognize them as what they are and recognize the process of thinking. And to break this, this, this pseudo identification with it, but the identification with thought is very much analogous to dreaming and not knowing that you're dreaming. And
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, I'm advocating here where you can actually just recognize thoughts, as thoughts. And there's something that the way in which
Thoughts, steal over us where it's like you're trying to pay attention to something and then all of a sudden you're you're replaying and argument that you had with your wife, you know yesterday right. And helplessly and it and it's actually it's dredging up the emotion that is appropriate to that argument. Right? So now you're getting angry or regretful or whatever it is.
It's it's quite crazy. It's totally normal. And this is the default state of most people, most of the time, but given how unhappy the character of our conversation is with ourselves. Most of the time given that the stories were telling ourselves are less than perfectly inspiring and perfectly ennobling and great, you know opening us to Great reservoirs of compassion and wisdom, right? They're not doing that. It's
Looking into this and it is it does have this dream like character of both coming out of nowhere and ceasing to completely seizing the reins of attention and identity and taking us elsewhere. And also we forget it. We it has a that's part of the totalitarian Spirit of rationality that proclivity. Well, it but it is, but a lot of these songs aren't rational is just, it's just you're just rehearsing your
Perience, it's just like, the old, tell yourself the same thing 10 times in a row, and never, and you won't be bored on the 10th time. You like if you just imagine what it would be like to externalize your thoughts on a loudspeaker for everyone to listen to, you know, and you were just you just it was just helplessly, you know, externalized. Every every normal person would sound insane, you know, because it because of the, the perseveration and the and the just the redundancy and the
And the strange structure to the discursiveness. I mean, this is this is a
You know, this ever-present it's soap. It's so ever-present. That it strike. It doesn't strike people as strange but to be presuming. We have a we have a dialogue with ourselves as though the I could talk to the me and that made any sense at all. It's like, you know, I'm sitting here and you're getting set up for this interview, right. And I will think
Oh, I got to get some water right now. I know if I'm the one to say it, and I'm the one who here is brined. I'm, I know I need water. Who am I tell? Ya. It's like, it's like I'm telling someone else, right? Who needs to be informed about this. Well, you're probably telling the prefrontal cortex and it tells the motor cortex. So, you know, it's, that's probably the hypothalamus talking to the prefrontal cortex because it doesn't have direct output over the motor cortex. Something like,
That it wasn't. I mean it did. Yeah, it remains to be seen whether any of that is actually functionally necessary. But I think for the most part it's not. I mean for the most part, we simply talk to. It's almost like we started talking to our parents, you know, once we once we had once my language is incredibly useful as you know, and it's it is what defines us as as people in many respects and once it get to it's like once it gets tuned up, it never shuts off and, you know, we're talking to so, you know.
First, we're pre-linguistic. And we're just drinking in language, that's aimed at us. You know, all the time. Our parents are jabbering to us. We begin to understand what they're saying. As so much of it is, you know, indexical they're pointing to things, and we're naming those things. We're hearing that, the sounds associated with those, the things that are being grasped and handed to us and, and soon we begin to participate in this language game in ways that were not conscious of and once this gets tuned up,
We talk to our parents. We jabber to our parents incessantly and then we Jabbar to ourselves when they leave the room and it never stops. Well, you know, in in mcgilchrist and I have talked about this issue and he's of the opinion. I hope I'm not misrepresenting him and and it's an idea that I had shared to some degree. Is that
The right hemisphere in many ways. This is in left-handed people at least and some sense is more regulated by the underlying limbic structures, the motivational structures like an animal is and and the left hemisphere to the degree that it's linguistic. It inhibits those right? Hemisphere functions tonically. And that's likely the speech. And what that means implies. Perhaps is that if you can shut that speech,
Off there's a different mode of perception that's characterized by the right hemispheres. Immerse meant in these underlying motivational systems that might be part and parcel of that revivification possibility that you're I think you're pointing to as something that lies outside the linguistic landscape. And that can be a maybe. Hyper dominant has become hyper dominant in us because we're so immersed in language. I mean from what I can tell thus far the
Research on the neuroimaging research on meditation is still in its infancy. Despite the fact there have been hundreds and even thousands of paper papers at this point on meditation, but you know, silencing the default mode network is certainly part of the, the footprint of the change here, that is relevant and the default mode Network for people. I mean, many people have heard of this by now, but it used to be kind of an esoteric topic, but just two Brief Review.
The default mode network is called the default mode because it was noticed in virtually every neuroimaging experiment ever design. That there was this the system of structures in the midline of the brain. That would would increase their their activity in between tasks. So, whatever, the Paradigm was, if you're giving people a reading task or a sensory task, or a memory task or we visual discrimination, whatever it is, you're putting them in the scanner. They have to pay attention to something in those epics.
In task, when they were no longer having to pay attention to something that would there waiting for the next thing to be presented to them. This, these set of structures in the midline would increase their activity and it was called the default mode is just the kind of the brains idling state. But these are also the structures that that seemed to have a disproportionate amount of responsibility for self-reference and self representation and and they get tuned up even further. When you give people time.
Tasks, that require a sent a retrospective analysis of the self, you know, if I gave you a list of words and I was saying and I asked you to decide which of these words apply to you and which of these words don't apply to you as a person, right? That's the kind of task that would increase, you know, be above Baseline activity and in the default mode Network. And there are other components to this answer to questions of identity and a lot of that.
Is in whole or in part mediated by the default mode. And this is what becomes noticeably quiet? Essent when you are successfully practicing mindfulness and it becomes quite hesitant in those experiences, it with psychedelics, where the sense of self is transcended for a time. Now where linguistic communication often becomes extremely difficult. Yeah. Yeah, but people experience it. But so what's interesting here, is that that
You know, I think people.
In ordinary people who do not take psychedelics, and I have no interest in meditation, do experience.
Interruptions in this sense of self a lot that just go unrecognized. And sometimes they go recognized, because they're their so-called Peak experiences, where, you know, flow experiences where, you know, they'll even the kinds of experiences you referenced, you know, looking up at the Milky Way and the, the most beautiful encounter with, with a starry night, you have, you know, in that decade, say, you've gone to the place where there's the least light pollution, and you've got
A cloudless moonless night and then you point your gaze Skyward and you get the full experience. That's you know.
There are two experiences people tend to have when they when they have sought out a peak experience like that. If they're lucky, they really have something like a moment where they're lifted out of themselves and they they can just have something like this, breathtaking encounter with nature, right? And then all too often that lasts, you know, a second and a half and then they're just talking about it and thinking about it and trying to get back to it, but they're still just
A brain to themselves and to, you know, whoever's with them, very likely trying to get a hold of this thing where if you took mushrooms, or if you took acid in that circumstance, well, then your linguistic, you know, efforts to to get this thing in hand or completely blown over and you have the full, you know, multi our encounter with the thing itself, right? And it's, you know, that's what that's what's so amazing about psychedelics. Is that whoever you are.
Warm is, let's leave aside the prospect of having a bad trip, which we know about which many interesting things can be said, the so-called good trip you can have on mushrooms or LSD is this condition of the data of your senses and your in particular in a circumstance? Like the one you described your engagement with the natural world becomes so vivid. So Salient that the boundary between
Delphine world is completely overcome, right? So you like and the energetics of all of that suddenly becomes very Salient. So it's not just like, you're no longer representing yourself, also the consequences, you know, you know, Griffiths work and if someone has a mystical experience on psilocybin and they're smokers, they stop 75% of the time. Yeah. Yeah. It's like they live so far out of themselves that even their addictions left. Yeah. Yeah, right. That's quite something the, you know, you talked about being possessed.
By that default Network while to be possessed by an addiction, like a nicotine addiction, is something like that. Going, wild nonetheless, going there. Apparently has this transformative capacity. You also see the same thing with treatment for alcoholics, you know, I mean for years alcohol, researchers have known that the only reliable treatment for alcoholism is spiritual transformation. That's hard. As Empirical research has been wrestling with that for a long time.
Well, I can give it gives you the sense that, you know, again that I'm not, I'm not claiming that the the beatific Vision that one has on LSD or psilocybin is necessarily the true Target state of one's spiritual life. I mean, it's, you know, in some ways. I think it's not it's there's something misleading about it. But at a minimum, these are this, this can't end of the Continuum of positive experience, you know, just the just being flooded with bliss.
And, and completely overcome with, with an encounter with the present moment. And then and meaning, you know, just the perception of meaning, whether that meaning can be rationally justified in the end, right? Because literally, you can, if you're in the right state of mind, it doesn't matter what you're looking at. It doesn't have to be the Milky Way. You can just be staring at a, you know, a puddle in the concrete in a parking lot. And all of a sudden that is the, you know, the answer to the mystery of existence, right? So in some ways, it's its
Really, there's a place to stand where you can pathologize this, you know, it's this her often a of meaning but leaving that aside leaving that criticism of aside, The Experience itself, proves Beyond any possibility of doubt that it's possible to have an utterly transforming transformative and totally satisfying encounter with the present moment that. Isn't it, self-dependent.
On anything happening. It's a quality of your attention. Now, neurochemically, that something obviously has to happen in order to to allow you to pay attention that fully to anything but there is a way of granting your attention to the present moment, so that the sacredness of anything comes fully into view. So, okay. Let me I got a couple of questions for you on that. So let's go back to this Starry Night idea. So I want to tell you a story.
You coming to bed hun? Yep, honey. I'll be right there. Just got to turn out the light.
Some things never change like your kids always leaving tiny toys on the floor for you to step on and Geico saving, folks, lots of money on their car
insurance. Sweetie. I think I left it downstairs, light on.
Please don't make me go 15 minutes. Could save you, 15% or more. I was always talking to my wife today about the fact that I was going to talk to you because she's been following your
Course, but at the same time that she's done. She she was she had a medical death sentence two years ago. Yeah, fundamental. Yeah. Okay, so she's been through a variety of forms of hell and has come out the other side and has changed in consequence of that. And one of the things she started doing as well as doing your meditation course was using the rosary. So I asked her today. He's also be talking to Jonathan patio who's a extraordinarily interesting.
Testing religious thinker who carves icons. He's a former French Canadian young guys very very deep person in my estimation in any case. She's been praying the rosary and I said, okay, so while you do that and you listen to Sam's meditations and so, how does that work? And she said well, I do the rosary first. I said, well, what do you why do you do that? And what do you do? And how do you see them related? And she said, well with the rosary, so she's concentrating on Mary and she said, marries a as a conduit to Christ and
All explain what you meant by that in a sec, but she, it's a, I said, she said, well first, it's a practice. Okay, so she does it every day. So it's an embodied practice, right? So she says the words, and she moves these beats and so she's moving her hands. And there's it's divided into five sections. And so when her attention wanders from prayer, it's brought back because there's five sections, right? So you imagine you have this tendency to wander off into the
alt Network and but by manipulating something with your hands ties you to the present moment. Yeah. Okay. So it's a meditative practice that that's more embodied than just sitting still say and she finds that useful and and while she says the words, well, we've talked a lot about what these words mean. And so, in reference to The Starry Night, for example, there's this series of Renaissance paintings, which are quite magnificent, that show an image of Mary with her with 12 Stars around her head.
And with her foot on a serpent, and that's that's an allusion to the Garden of Eden because well Eve crushes the serpent beneath her foot. And so and this is relevant to your discussion in our discussion earlier about the deepest of all evils, right? Because that that's a concern of yours. It's been a concern of mine. What's the darkest possible place? Well, the that snake in those paintings represent that and that's why in Christianity the snake which is a predator is
Created with Satan, right? As the as what would you say? The Emissary of evil or malevolent something like that? And so, because Mary has her head in the Stars. She can have her foot on the serpent and that's part of that meditation. And while she does that before, she listens to your meditation, but that's where I see the the psychological link. Let's say because you want to put your psyche in the highest possible place, whatever that is. And
Don't know what it is, exactly. But it's something like, what happens when you look up at the night sky, it's something like that. And if you do that, that means that your foot is simultaneously on that serpent. Hmm. Yeah, no and I don't have any facilities. It's wonderful that she's using the app and getting some benefit from it. I love that and there's and my and the juxtaposition of doing the rosary with doing.
You know what? I'm recommending. The app is not as odd as you might think. It is. In my mind in my view. I mean, I have, you know, it's there's so much of
There's so much. There's so much resonance between what I think is true and the kinds of things. Jesus said, write my own my issue. My, my issue with organized religion. Every organized religion is just that clearly, what we're really talking about are deeper Universal truths about the nature of mind right now, but you know, whether we do it, we don't limit it to human minds or just mind itself, Consciousness itself.
And so there's no culture. There's no religion. There's no provincial cult that has the full story and what we real it, what the really the burden on us in every present generation, you know, but certainly now in the 21st century where they're all the barriers to 22 universalization y'all the barriers to information getting information and translating from
Our language is all of that's broken down. We have, we have access to everyone's ideas right there. Been a hundred billion people and a bunch of them have had good ideas. A bunch of them have bet had bad ideas and we have access to two thousands of years. Yeah human conversation. It's a lot of my only argument out what those ideas were. My only argument is that we should only care about using the best ideas and we should and we no longer have the right to
Knee Deep serious sectarianism right now. We can be that's not to say that you can't be especially taken with with Jesus and the tradition that has grown up around him. And you know, you're not, so you're kind of bored with Socrates and so you don't spend as much time with him and that's all fine. But the problem I've had traditionally with organized religion is religion. Historically is the only corner of culture, where people begin saying to themselves.
Into their children.
We're playing a totally different game over here. This is not just this is not a matter of just ideas and human beings and human conversations and ordinary books. No. No, these books were written by God or inspired by God, you know, and they can't be edited and everything cat seems to me that laying the danger in that. I'm not disagreeing with you, but it seems to be the danger in that. Is that it it actually minimizes.
The problem of atrocity that's associated with sectarianism because and perhaps, you don't know, I'll agree with you away. You can Heap as many atrocities as you want on that side of the balance. I will agree with you. Well, okay. So this is what I'm pointing to though, because we were having a discussion in some ways about sacred things. And so and then we're talking about the issue of religion. And so there's a couple of things I want to say about that. Dostoyevsky. Had it right to some degree in the
Inquisitor. Because the, you remember that story? The Grand Inquisitor. Yeah, it's been been many. Okay. Now several decades of actually read the book but well the remarkable thing about that story is Christ, comes back to Earth and he does some Miracles and it's the church himself that puts him in jail. And then the head of the church comes to the jail. And says, what the hell are you doing back here. The last thing we need, is you, we've got everything sorted out. We know what's going on. It's like, we're going to put you to death tomorrow.
And the Christ kisses him on the lips and the grand Inquisitor turns white. And then when he leaves the grand Inquisitor, he leaves the door open and that was that's so brilliant. And, you know, Dostoyevsky was writing at the same time. It was Nietzsche and had quite an influence on Nietzsche, as it turned out and, but because Dostoyevsky was writing fiction, he could go places that Dostoyevsky couldn't go as a philosopher, and one of the things he was trying to point out. Was that, despite the
The proclivity to totalitarianism that you can lay at the feet of sectarian religion.
The door is left open and you know, all of us have to come to terms with the fact that our institutions religious, and otherwise tend to ossify into these totalitarian structures that are analogous socially, I think in some ways to the default Network that you just described there, trying to point to something beyond that, but you know, they degenerate and ossify and then, but then we have to go underneath that to if we're going to get our criticisms, right?
Was as terrified as it's reasonable to be about religious sectarianism and totalitarianism. It's also necessary to remember that chimpanzees go on raiding parties and, and kill the neighboring tribe, so to speak. And they're not motivated by religious concerns. And so to put that at the feet of religion, even implicitly. I think as I understand why,
That's an Impulse, but it doesn't face the problem deeply enough, and it also obscures a potential solution. I think, because it tends it tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And I know you're trying to regain the bay area and I'm trying to save the baby. Yeah. No, I love that baby. Yeah, I mean for me, the crucial variables that make religion itself, so
Matic are one the religions. And, and this is true of the, the abrahamic ones in particular, the religions that are focused on a text. Right? That can't be edited. Now, you religious moderates, and religious liberals will disagree with me, and they'll say that the whole tradition is a matter of, you know, reinterpreting and grappling with the, the contradictions and the, and there's that's of all the very rich discourse and blah, blah, blah, but
The real problem is the books themselves, betray their merely human origin on almost every page, you know, there's just like either it's true of the plays of Shakespeare. It's true of the Iliad and the Odyssey. It's true of Virgil. It's true of does Daffy ski and it's true of the Bible right in all its parts, right? So there's just there's and you know, if you just imagine how good
a book would be could be if it were truly written or dictated by it by an omniscient being. I mean, it's just it's trivially easy to imagine that if Jesus would be so much better than they impact. Our it's really not that easy to translate the sorts of experiences that you're pointing to into words that no. No, I know. I know I had it right? No, but it but you can you can do it. Won't you turn worse? Well, but let's talk about that for a minute better and worse.
That's really that. That and and I want to tie this back to your comments about navigation earlier. So, you know, we do have and this is perhaps an issue of definition, getting the definition straight. Again, here. We do have the sense that some texts are deeper than others and I don't think it's reasonable to disagree about that. You can read a shallow story, think. Well, you know, that was shallow and you can read a deep story and you think that was deep but you don't know exactly what you mean by.
A shallow or deep selected, but let me just add one hand. One footnote here, which is somewhat confound and it goes to what we were just saying about psychedelics. It's possible for you to be bringing the depth to a text or to a circumstance or to a puddle in the in a parking lot. That isn't necessarily there. Right? So like this is where it gets, always use the most modern quandary. Yeah, like like literally, I, you know, you, if you're if you are going to connect all the dots, you know.
You can name. This is something I did in the end of Faith as a parlor trick, just because I wanted to prove this point is that I literally walked into a bookstore and went to the cookbook. I'll the bookstore and randomly chose a cookbook and opened. It. Opened it up and random and just just dictate it. Just wrote down the recipe and then, created a mystical text on the basis of that recipe. Imagine. I just showed that this recipe, which it was for some Hawaiian. Cookbook was like, walk seared fish and shrimp cakes or something.
And I took the ingredients in that recipe and wove a completely confabulate, Ori mystical, text out of those ingredients. Now, that that was something I was bringing to the text. There was no author creating that document. That's clearly a problem and it look, I understand if the tribal people can always do that, right? So that that's it's very hard to keep score here and to be and to be rigorous. All we can do is again and again have this this
Instead of you say something that that on your own side, purports to be meaningful and intends to be meaningful and you're trying to convey something. And then I and other people seem to grasp what you're communicating and we have this intersubjective convergence, which is increasingly satisfying. And yes, it's so I mean to but I do take your point that they I do Dostoevsky was writing, you know, the brothers karamazov is a deeply interesting, meaningful document.
And so let's take that away because you put your finger on the postmodern quandary, right? Because the post modernists in some sense. The reason that they ran into trouble with assuming they criticized that notion that there was a canonical interpretation of a text because there's so many subjective interpretations of any text. In fact, there's a near infinite number of potential, subjective, interpretations of any text. Just like there's almost an
For the number of places you could be looking right now. And so it's a huge deep problem. So, so and when you say that you can project something onto the text that in some sense isn't there. That's also a extremely deep problem and these problems are deep enough, you know, the fact of multiple interpretations of a single reality is so pervasive that it stopped AI researchers. It's the thing that stopped AI researchers from being able to build functional robots like
It's a killer probably. Yeah, it's okay and props. Oh, right. That's the frame prom. Okay. So let's let's let's agree that that exists. But we should also agree and partly, I think by the merits of your own argument that we do have a reliable subjective intuition that texts differ in depth and that, that means something. So, I'm going to propose what it means and you tell me what you think about this. Okay? Sure. So, one of the ways that we specify, where to look at is by looking at
What we deem to be important. And so here's a way of conceptualizing that and it sort of maps onto the idea of the fovea, extending outward to less high-resolution Consciousness. So I write a sentence because I want to write a paragraph. I write it paragraph because I want to sequence paragraphs into a book. A chapter. I write chapters to sequence them into a book. I read a book because I want to be a practicing scientist. I want to be a practicing scientists because I'm a good citizen. I want to be a good citizen.
Citizen hypothetically because I want to be a good person, you know, and maybe I want to be a good person to avoid the hell that you described. Okay. So those are nested value structures and we see the world through that structure, symbol taneous lie, the whole thing is there, and if one part of it, collapses, we make reference to the part that contains it. That's how we don't crash. Like a computer. Now, that now the navigation that you
And these nested structures their navigation maps, as far as I can tell. Mmm now, okay, so here's the depth issue.
Some maps have more other Maps dependent on them than other Maps do, okay. So if I go into your map structure, some of that's even proposition lies. And I mess about with the deeper axiomatic propositions upon which many other propositions rest, then that's going to disturb you fundamentally and that's part of that experience of depth.
And, you know, look look, you get much more, if you're married and you love your wife, your much more upset. If she divorces you. Then if you have an argument about who should do the dishes, well, why? Well, because the stability of your marriage is a precondition for all sorts of other ways that you perceive the world. And if that's violated. Well, that's traumatic.
Yeah, so so when we so and the reason I'm trying to get this clear with you is because you think clearly about these things. But also because it allows
To it allows for clarification of language in some sense. So we could say that as you go deeper into that nested structure, what you approach becomes more and more Sacred By definition. I'm trying to Define it experientially. Because the so let's say you're transformed at a fundamental level. That means something shifts way down deep and that's how you feel it, even in an embodied.
Sense and what we've defined as as human beings, as religious, as far as I can tell her is sacred
is
our attempt to define the landscape that is characterized by those deepest structures of maps.
Now what you're talking about, I think is outside the map system, altogether in some sense, you know, it's the container for all of it.
Yeah, it is in some sense because or it's orthogonal to admit it penetrates it at every point, but it's not reducible to it. And that's why it's so consequential, who's so, for instance. I think you can. So to taking accepting your, your picture of nested maps, and, and depth, and all that. I be, I agree with all of that, and Maps can be more or less.
Useful more and more or less in register with with the the reality, they're purporting to describe, right? So you can have faulty maps and then science. We really try to get an accurate map and and we have high resolution. Yeah, and we have a language game, which is when it's working, is optimized to, you know, as Richard Fineman famously said not fooling ourselves, right? Me, that's like the master value of not fooling yourself. Whereas I would argue in religious.
Of course, not fooling yourself is not a master value. And in fact, you know, so much of what goes by the name of religious Faith terminology, then you talk about the sacred, right? And and and you accept that and and you also, and you also see it as revivifying and and crucial to the prevention of suffering. Yeah, but you juxtapose that against religion. And so what what's the difference as far as you're concerned between what's sacred and what's religious?
Yeah, good question. Well, so
maybe the best way to get at it is by reference to a principle, which is
I think what I think anything. That's true, right? And this is true scientifically prescriptively, but it's true. Spiritually and is true with respect to anything. We would call sacred anything. That's true. Anything is real is discoverable now, right? It's like a little like like if we lost everything, we lost all the books. If we lost all the tools that we lost everything and we just found ourselves having to reboot, not only civilization, but human
Action, you know, everything that is real is discoverable from that starting point. If yours, even if you're starting in zero again now, we would we would talk about it differently. We would have, you know, we would, we would have memories of what, you know, some of us would have memories of all that we've lost and that would anchor us to certain expectations. But the point is, what is true. What is real? What is, what is, what is the real opportunity for a direct?
T', self-transcending engagement with reality. Right? What is the real opportunity for of me? Taking exception? Let me take exception to that in one manner. I see what you mean. I understand what you mean, I believe, but here's here's a potential problem with that. So, I first, I'm not saying, let me just close the door to a possible misunderstanding. I'm not saying that we shouldn't stand on the shoulders of giants. And I'm not saying tradition as useless. In fact, you know, I would probably,
agree with you that that we should be fairly conservative in how we in how we overthrow our Traditions. I mean, so I'm not arguing that we should just be radical iconoclasts, that tears it. We should tear everything down to the studs and start again. That's not that's not what I'm advocating. Well, what's the difference between? What's the difference in Your Vision? Then between the tradition that you would be conservative about and religion. I'm not trying to be under you. I'm just Tryin only how you're making the distinction. Conceptually. It comes down to very
Pacific claims that that I think are clearly false and which many of our religions advertised as not only important but indispensable for their projects, so take Islam as a specific example is, I mean Islam mainstream Islam, not just Al-Qaeda style Islam, just any Islam that really is worthy of the name and the year 2021 is founded on the claim.
That the Quran is the literal word of God it and it is it is not to be sued as what does literal mean? Yeah, but but in the minds of most Muslims, most of the time it means that these stanzas were dictated to Muhammad and his cave by the Archangel Gabriel and he was he was commanded to recite and he recited them. And what we have here is in truth, the claim, the the Orthodox claim is
Is even more stringent than what the the seemingly analogous, you know, fundamentalist religion, you know, Christian Claim about the Bible. It's not just that the text itself is, is verbatim What God said, it's that the document itself is. In fact, like the every instantiation of the physical document is itself, the word of God. It's like it's sort of a double.
Layer of sacredness to it. Why is that it cannot be edited? Or is it the problem that the people who purport to understand that claim to be 100%, right to? No. No, but the problem is that, given that claim and given the actual contents of the book, which you have is an endless source of divisiveness and conflict. Like, if you dignify that,
Claims. Okay. This is the most important series of utterances ever expressed on Earth. This is it. Let's find out what the creator of the universe wants. Us to know what he wants us to know, above. All else, is that one we should hate and fear and despise and resist and never befriend unbelievers, right? That's, that's that. Message comes through on virtually every page and a hell.
Has been prepared for these unbelievers where their skins will be endlessly burned off of them and and and replenish so that it can be tortured a new right. Do you think there's any relationship between that claim and your observation that failure to take refuge in the sacred as you laid it out? Dooms you to possession by the default Network and puts you in tension is okay. So it is potential is possible to give a very enlightened reading.
Of this text or really any text that that allows you to step out of its divisive and, and toxic implications. So I would support that kind of reading, you know, if we knew who we were joined in this conversation, by by Muslim Scholars who said, no, no, don't you understand, Jordan's, spiritual interpretation of this admonishment is precisely what God intended. He
It to be, to be an engine, not of hate and Division and sectarian tribalism. He intended to be a device that would allow you to recognize the the emotional and cognitive implications of being caught by dualism. Say rightly really it etcetera. Etcetera. We go as far as you want in that direction, that'd be great. The problem is
The book itself gives no indication that your interpretation is the right one. And, in fact, it gives every indication that it's not and that is heterodox with the sequence of Muslim Scholars. Good luck will hold well-wishing. I wish you good luck there. Yeah. Well, I praying for good luck because it's a, it's a conversation that absolutely needs to be had. Yes, I would agree, sad. But my clothes just to finally close.
This chapter, I would just say that. It's not that what you're doing with the book is impossible. My concern is that
These book these books. Tend to make that very difficult and there are other more plausible and easier. Let you lie interpretations that require less, hermeneutics, less cognitive bandwidth, less, less principles of Charity, and less cosmopolitanism. And, and so, therefore, it's no accident that you wind up with something like the Islamic State. If you take the Quran, very, very seriously. And that's, that's what worries me as we as we live in this world.
Where is increasingly easy for small numbers of people to screw up the whole project for millions of us, you know, as technology, you know leverages the consequence of as well. That's why people is okay sing on development of the individual, you know, yes, it is increasingly possible for individuals to do that. So we have to stop doing it. Yes. Yeah. So I'm with you there look I would love to keep talking to you. I want to ask you one more guy getting tired and that's why. Yeah. No, I know because he minded what?
First, maybe we should do another event. Sure. Okay, I will talk to my agents second. This idea, you had about escaping from the text. Let's say in returning to existential first principles or phenomenological, first principles. The only objection I can see to that, is that
If you lose, you can't derive the way of producing a social organization directly from the existential experience. And so that's a right? Because you think look partly. We're going to derive our sacred values from this level this strata of experience that you described but there's also an element. There's also the fact that we derive our values from Collective Agreement, right? So we then maybe we
We feed the Collective Agreement with the sacred experience. But then if we lose that that Collective tradition, we it's very difficult to rebuild that from first principles 100% and and and I would say just to clear up any confusion on this point. I'm not suggesting that meditation or even the deepest insights. You can have through meditation or psychedelics is sufficient.
For everything to forget for us to get everything we want out of life, right? It's like it's I think it's proper, use is as you described is seeding. Every other ordinary moment in life with this capacity, to refresh the mind. And, and
And an allowance, we have a revivified the stale dogma of Ben Ali just just it is the thing that equips us to actually be loving and unconflicted and relaxed in the present moment. Whatever is whatever is going on. But when you ask the question, what should we do to build a viable Global civilization? There's so many other modes of conversation and knowledge Gathering and Reliance upon institutions.
Enter and tradition that is necessary. You know, I'm not I'm not imagining some beautiful state of nature where we have lost our all of the structure that we've built up over thousands of years, and we just we just meditate as a to yogis. And yeah. And then try to figure out then try to call. Someone when are you know, internet goes down, right? We there's a tremendous amount of knowledge that we need to do anything. Well at this point, you know, as we've just witnessed in, you know, getting through the, you know,
Now, we're now in our second year of a global pandemic, right? I mean, we have a lot to figure out. How do we, how do we even make sense with one another in the presence of social media? And how do we respond when when trust in institutions has broken down? And is a lot to figure out and meditation and you know psilocybin and any you know and a full speed collision with the with the beauty and profundity. The present moment isn't the answer to many of those questions. It's just, it is
Is the answer to its away other things, a Wellspring, you know, like the existential dread and, you know, Etc. So yeah, I mean, that's anyway, I love talking to you and I'm very happy to see your face and it's really good to see you again. And I remember why we kept talking now. Yeah, and maybe I remember why other people came and listened and so I would love to do it again. Sure, sure. Well, because we're gonna will hammer it out, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, good to see you.
Amanda, thanks for agreeing to talk to me again and likewise good luck with your app and everything that you're doing. Yeah, and with your orientation, towards the highest good, all of that. Yeah. Back at you, back at you. Okay, man. Take care of his dark soon. Okay, I'll get in touch. I look forward to it.
