Essentials: Using Meditation to Focus, View Consciousness & Expand Your Mind | Dr. Sam Harris

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Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, [music] where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based [music] tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now, for my discussion with Dr. Sam Harris. Dr.

Sam Harris, what is this thing that we call a self? You know, as far as I know, we have not localized the region in the brain that can entirely account for our awareness of self. >> The problem is we we use the term self in so many different ways, right? And and there’s there’s one sense of that term, which um is the charge of meditation, and you’ll hear it from me, that this self is an illusion, right? And and that there’s a there’s a psychological freedom that can be experienced on the other side of discovering it to be an illusion.

And some people don’t like that framing, some people would would insist that it’s not so much an an illusion, but it’s a it’s a construct, and it’s not what it seems. The thing that doesn’t exist, uh it certainly doesn’t exist as it seems, and I would I would want to argue that it actually is just a proper illusion, is this the sense that there is a subject interior to experience, in addition to experience. So, most people feel like they’re having an experience of the world, and they’re having their an experience of their bodies in the world. And in addition to that, they feel that they are a subject internal to the body. Most people feel like they’re behind their face as a kind of locus of awareness and thought and intention.

It’s almost like they’re you’re a passenger inside your body. Most people don’t feel identical to their experience. They feel like they’re on the edge of experience, somehow appropriating it from the side. You you’re kind of on the edge of the world, and the world is out there, your body is is in some sense an object in the world, uh which you you know, you it’s different from the world, you know, the the boundary of your skin is still meaningful. You can sort of you loosely control your body.

I mean, you can’t control you can control your gross and subtle, you know, voluntary motor movements, but you’re not controlling everything your body is doing. You’re not controlling your heartbeat and your hormonal secretions and all of that. And so there’s a lot that’s going on that is in the dark for you. Then you give someone an instruction to meditate, say, and you say, “Okay, well, let’s let’s examine all of this from the first-person side. Let’s look for this thing you’re calling I.

” They’re going to close their eyes, very likely. And now they’re going to pay attention to something. They’re going to pay attention to the breath or to sounds. And it’s from the point of view of being a locus of attention that is now aiming attention strategically at an object like the breath that there’s this dualism that is set up. And the ultimate promise of meditation, I mean, there really two levels at which you could be interested in in meditation.

Um one is, you know, very straightforward and remedial and non-paradoxical and very well subscribed and it’s it’s the usual set of claims about all the benefits you’re going to get from meditation, right? So, you’re going to lower your stress and you’re going to increase your focus and you’re going to, you know, stave off cortical thinning and there’s all kinds of good things that science is saying meditation will will give you. But from my point of view, the real purpose of meditation and its real promise is not in this long list of of benefits and I you know, I’m not discounting any of those. Though, you know, the science for many of them is quite provisional. It’s in this deeper claim that if you look for this thing you’re calling I, if you look for the sense that there’s a thinker in addition to the the the mere arising of the next thought, say, you won’t find that thing.

And you can not find it in a way that’s conclusive. Uh and that matters, right? And and and it has a there’s a host of benefits that follow from that discovery, which are quite a bit deeper and more interesting than engaging meditation on the side of its benefits, you know, destressing, increasing focus, and all the rest. Many people think meditation is about changing the contents of consciousness. You know, there’s some some contents you want to get rid of like anxiety, other contents you want to to encourage like calm and you know, unconditional love or you some other, you know, classically pleasant prosocial emotion.

Um and that’s all fine. That’s all possible. But the real, you know, wisdom of, you know, the the 2,000-year-old wisdom of meditation that really is the, you know, the the chewy center of the the Tootsie Pop is a recognition of what consciousness itself is always already like regardless of the contents and and the changes in contents. And classic flow experiences have this this quality where there’s the and this this tends to be why they’re so rewarding. Um where there’s just if you’re in in some, you know, athletic activity or, you know, an an aesthetic one or you could be having sex or you could be whatever it is, some peak experience, its peakness usually entails there being some brief period where there was no distance between you and the experience, right?

There were for that moment you were no longer looking over your own shoulder or anticipating the next moment or trying to get somewhere where where you weren’t or, you know, micromanaging errors or, you know, like this you know, this not there’s just the flow of unity with whatever the the you know, whatever the experience is, you know, a surfer on on the wave, right? And we love those experiences. We are continually abstracted away from them by our thinking about them. Like we’re we’re thinking, “Oh my god, that what that was so good or how do I get back to that? ” Or, you know, you’re looking at a sunset, it’s the most beautiful sunset you’ve ever seen and then you’re continually interrupting the experience of merely seeing it with a commentary about how amazing this is and I I I wonder you know what are real estate prices here.

I mean is it possible that actually we could move here and like you you you your mind is just continually narrating a a conversation you’re having with yourself. However paradoxically, I mean you’re telling yourself things yourself things that you already know uh as though there were two of you rather often, right? Like you know, you’re just you know, I’m looking for you know, which which is the water and I say, “Oh, there it is. ” Right? But like I’m the one seeing it.

Who am I saying, “Oh, you know, there it is. ” too? As though there’s someone else who needs to be informed about the thing I already saw, right? So, it’s it’s there’s something about our internal dialogue that is paradoxical. And that’s what ultimately meditation is.

I mean this kind of meditation. You you ultimately learn to recognize that there’s no separation from you between you and your experience, right? There’s not the experience on the one hand and the self on the other. There’s just experience. It’s not that you’re on the riverbank uh and this is this is how it can seem in the beginning even when you’re practicing meditation fairly diligently.

It can seem like you’re on the riverbank watching the contents of consciousness flow by and then and meditation is the act of doing that more and more dispassionately. So, you’re no longer grabbing at the at the pleasant or pushing the unpleasant away. You’re just kind of relaxing and in a in the most non-judgmental frame of mind just witnessing the flow, right? But if you’re doing that dualistically you feel like the meditator. You feel like the subject aiming atte