Meditation

If you would spend 18 hours a day meditating for a month. At the end of the month you will be noticing this white noise, this torrent of discursivity that is preventing you from staying on breath for a minute. And staying for a minute without getting distracted is a heroic feat. If you could pay attention to anything without being lost in thought for a minute at a time there would be neurophysiological correlates that are very drug like. There is immense pleasure that people get from being concentrated. There is bliss, rapture. Feeling of expansiveness in the mind, where your body disappears and consciousness feel like a vast void. And a only thing that appears might be the thing you were paying attention to. And even that might disappear and there is nothing but pure consciousness – an extraordinarily pleasurable psychedelic like experience. If you were actually concentrated as you imagine your self to be that would be very accessible to you. – Sam Harris in conversation with Adam Grant (1:02:08)

When we grow up – there is all the stuff happening to you and your life. And some of it you're processing, some of it your absorbing and some of it you don't. You don't have time so it gets buried in you. It's all these preferences, judgments, unresolved situations and issues. And is like an email inbox. Just piling up. Email after email after email that's not answered, going back 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And then when you sit down to meditate those emails are coming back at you. Hey, what about this issue? What about that issue? Did you solve this? Do you think about that?

And that gets scary. People don't want to do that. I can't clear my mind. I better get up and not do this. But really what's happening it's self therapy. Instead of paying a therapist to listen to you, you are listening to yourself. And you have to sit there as these emails go one by one until you get to the magical inbox zero. And then comes the day when the only things you are thinking about are the things that happened yesterday because you processed everything else. Not necessarily resolved it but at least listened to yourself ...

The problem with what I'm talking about is you will have to listen to you in mind for a long time. It's not gonna work if you don't do at least an hour a day and preferably at least 60 days before you can work through a lot of issues so it'll be hell for a while. But when you come out on the other side, it's great.

When the chatter comes it is in the background, it's dimmer, it's smaller. You heard it before. You seen the patterns. It's more recent. It's something you need to resolve anyway, and you will get moment of actual silence ...

When you're really meditating you're not there. There are no thoughts. There are no experiences. There's nothing ... Every psychedelic state that people encounter using so-called plant medicines can be arrived at just through pure meditation.

Joe Rogan: You've hit some transcendent psychedelic states?

Yes. I have had trippy visuals. I've had the kind of lights and colors. I had so-called downloads. I've had realizations. I've had the bliss.

Joe Rogan: But not every time?

No, it's rare and I would say that's also like an experience that you can start craving, which will then actually take you out of meditation ...

The place that I want to end up the most is just peace. Peace to me is happiness at rest. And happiness is a piece in motion. ... The way we think we get peace is resolving all the external problems. There are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get piece is on the inside – by giving up this idea of problems.

(20:51) I’m trying to turn off my monkey mind. I think, when we’re born as children, we’re pretty blank slates. We’re living very much in the moment. We’re essentially just reacting to our environment through our instincts. We’re living in, what I would call the “real world.” When puberty comes along, that’s the onset of desire, it’s the first time you really, really want something and you start long-range planning for it. Because of that, you start thinking a lot and start building an identity and an ego to go and get what you want.

This is all normal and healthy. It’s part of being the human animal. I think at some point it gets out of control and then we are constantly talking to ourselves in our head. We’re playing little movies in our heads, walking down the street, but no one’s actually there. Of course, if we started voicing this thought in your head that you’re always having, you’d be a madman and they’d lock you up.

The reality is if you walk down the street and there are a thousand people in the street, I think all thousand are talking to themselves in their head at any given point. They’re constantly judging everything that they see. They’re playing back movies of things that happened to them yesterday. They’re living in fantasy worlds of what’s going to happen tomorrow. They’re just pulled out of base reality.

That could be good when you’re doing long-range planning. It can be good when you’re solving problems. It’s good for the survival and replication machines that we are. I think it’s actually very bad for your happiness. In my mind, the mind should be a servant and a tool, not a master. It’s not something that should be controlling me and driving me 24/7.

I’ve taken on this idea that I want to break the habit of uncontrolled thinking, which is hard. If I say to you, “Don’t think of a pink elephant”, I just put a pink elephant in your head. It’s an almost impossible problem. It’s more something that has to be guided by feel, than guided by actual thinking or thought process. I’m deliberately cultivating experiences, states of mind, locations, activities, that will help me get out of my mind.

All of society does that to some extent. In some sense, the people chasing thrills in action sports or flow states or orgasm or any of these states that people really strive to get to, a lot of these are basically just trying to get out of your own head. They’re trying to get away from that voice in your head and this overdeveloped sense of self. At the very least, I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and become stronger as I get older. I want it to be weaker and more muted so that I can live much more in present every day and accept nature and the world for what it is and appreciate it very much as a child would.