Meditation & Searching for The Self | Dr. Sam Harris & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | I mean, there's some fundamental, there's some false assumptions about the underlying
00:00:08.400 | logic of this process, which I think it's worth addressing.
00:00:12.440 | And it was actually, it was a kind of found object in the news that I talk about at one
00:00:19.080 | point, I forget where it is in the Waking Up app, but there was a story that I stumbled
00:00:23.560 | on on the internet, I think it's about 12 or 13 years old, of a tourist bus in, I think
00:00:30.840 | it was Norway, it was somewhere in Northern Europe.
00:00:35.640 | And it had about 30 people on it, and one person was described as an Asian woman, and
00:00:43.120 | they went to a rest stop, and everyone got off the bus.
00:00:46.520 | And they, you know, shopped and had lunch, and this Asian woman changed her clothing,
00:00:51.960 | for whatever reason.
00:00:52.960 | And they all got back on the bus.
00:00:55.440 | I think the relevance of it being an Asian woman is that, you know, there were language
00:00:57.920 | barriers that explained what later happened.
00:01:02.000 | So everyone gets back on the bus, the Asian woman has changed her clothing.
00:01:05.760 | And the bus is about to leave, but then someone notices, hey, there was an Asian woman who
00:01:09.360 | got off the bus who hasn't come back yet, and they tell the driver this.
00:01:15.520 | And this poses a problem, so now everyone's waiting for this person to return.
00:01:18.680 | But in fact, everyone was on the bus, this woman had just changed her clothing and was
00:01:22.320 | not recognized by her fellow travelers.
00:01:26.240 | So everyone gets concerned as this tourist doesn't, you know, show up, and they start
00:01:33.640 | looking for her, right?
00:01:35.240 | And they can't find her.
00:01:36.240 | And so a search party is formed.
00:01:38.140 | And the Asian woman, because of whatever language barrier, heard that there was a missing tourist,
00:01:45.440 | so she joins the search party, which in fact is looking for her, right?
00:01:49.760 | And this goes on into the night, and they're readying helicopters for a dawn patrol to
00:01:54.760 | find the missing tourist.
00:01:57.360 | Now at some point along the way, I think it was at like 3 in the morning, this tourist
00:02:02.400 | realizes that she is the object of this search, right?
00:02:06.800 | And obviously the whole thing unravels.
00:02:09.600 | She confesses that she changed her clothes, and, you know, the problem is solved.
00:02:14.240 | But the problem is not solved by the logic that the seeker is expected, right?
00:02:21.220 | So it's like, it's not true to say that the missing tourist was found in the way that
00:02:27.480 | was expected, right?
00:02:28.480 | Because the missing tourist was never lost.
00:02:30.040 | The missing tourist was part of the search party, right?
00:02:32.880 | And so when you think about it from her point of view, like, what happened?
00:02:36.920 | She's part of the search party.
00:02:38.600 | She's looking for the missing tourist, not knowing that she in fact is the missing tourist.
00:02:44.640 | So what happens at the moment she realizes that everyone's looking for her, right?
00:02:52.200 | Like, what is-- the search isn't consummated in the way that is implied by the logic of
00:02:59.440 | everyone's use of attention.
00:03:01.920 | And yet the problem evaporates.
00:03:04.880 | And there's something deeply analogous about the structure of that and the meditative journey.
00:03:12.800 | And precisely in, again, not talking about all the changes and the possible changes in
00:03:17.960 | the contents of consciousness that could be good, which, again, they come along for the
00:03:22.080 | ride anyway when you do the thing I'm talking about.
00:03:27.140 | It's on this point of looking for the self and not finding it.
00:03:30.800 | And there is this sense that, OK, the self is here, and it's a problem.
00:03:36.760 | It is the string upon which all of my conscious states, mostly unhappy ones, are strung, right?
00:03:43.520 | It's the thing that is at the center of my anxiety.
00:03:47.920 | It's the thing that I don't feel good about.
00:03:49.480 | It's the thing that when criticized, I sort of let implode.
00:03:55.300 | It's the center of my problem, and now I'm trying to feel better, and meditation has
00:03:58.720 | been handed to me as a possible remedy for my situation.
00:04:04.920 | And it's billed as a remedy.
00:04:06.120 | In fact, I'm hearing from this guy that this is the thing that is going to cause me to
00:04:11.600 | realize that myself isn't where or as I thought it was.
00:04:16.980 | So now I'm going to look, right?
00:04:18.600 | And so, again, the sense is I start out far away from the goal here.
00:04:26.200 | I start out with a problem.
00:04:28.080 | I'm now meditating on the evidence of my unenlightenment, right?
00:04:31.880 | I can feel my problem.
00:04:33.040 | I feel that I'm distracted and distractible, and I feel this sort of cramp at the center
00:04:38.360 | of my life.
00:04:39.360 | It's me, and I'm not as happy as I want to be.
00:04:41.760 | I'm not as confident as I want to be.
00:04:43.440 | I'm more distractible than I want to be, and now I'm paying attention to the breath, right?
00:04:50.240 | This is what the search party feels like.
00:04:52.100 | This is what the confused tourist feels like in her own search party.
00:04:56.960 | And she's looking for the missing person.
00:05:00.880 | And so the angle of, you know, the inclination of all of this is, and the logic of it, is
00:05:08.640 | all wrong, you know, understandably so, given how we all get into this situation.
00:05:16.160 | But you know, it's useful to continually try to undercut it and recognize that the thing
00:05:26.040 | that's being looked for is actually right on the surface, which is, you know, there
00:05:31.160 | is no one looking.
00:05:32.560 | There is no place from which you are, if you're paying attention to the breath, or to sounds,
00:05:38.280 | or noticing the next thought arise, the sense that you are over here doing that thing is
00:05:46.420 | actually what it's like to be thinking and not knowing that you're thinking.
00:05:50.640 | There's a thought, there's an undercurrent of thought that's going uninspected in that
00:05:54.180 | moment.
00:05:55.400 | And so there is just a, there's a continually looking for the mind, a looking for the center
00:06:01.720 | of experience, a looking for the one who is looking, which again, which is the kind of
00:06:06.840 | the orienting practice here.
00:06:08.920 | And there's a lot more I say about this, obviously, over at Waking Up, but it's the experiment
00:06:16.960 | you have to perform in order to get ready to recognize that this whole, the search party,
00:06:22.980 | you know, was formed in error, essentially.
00:06:26.120 | And the problem that you're trying to solve with this practice does evaporate in a similar
00:06:34.000 | way, which is like, you don't actually get there in the way that you're hoping for, right?
00:06:40.760 | It's like, like you drop out the bottom of this thing in an unexpected way.
00:06:44.640 | It's not, there's actually another kind of a similar parable or anecdote that I don't
00:06:52.040 | remember if it's Zen or Sufi, or, I mean, I'm sure it's been reappropriated in many
00:06:55.360 | different ways, but, or by many different traditions.
00:06:58.840 | But there's this, you know, the case of somebody who's lost in a town and they're asking for
00:07:03.920 | directions.
00:07:04.920 | You know, you could put this in Manhattan, you could, let's say you're wandering Manhattan
00:07:09.080 | and you're a tourist, you don't know where anything is.
00:07:11.360 | And you stop and ask someone, you know, "Where is Central Park?"
00:07:15.380 | And the person thinks for a second, they says, "Oh yeah, unfortunately you can't get to Central
00:07:19.080 | Park from here."
00:07:20.080 | Right?
00:07:21.080 | So that is a very strange, I mean, you think about that for a second, you realize, okay,
00:07:26.520 | that's a, that's an absurd claim.
00:07:29.560 | There is no place that you can't get to from the place you're starting, you know, on earth,
00:07:34.280 | right?
00:07:35.280 | It's a failure to describe the physical relationships between anything in the world.
00:07:39.040 | Yeah.
00:07:40.040 | That's just not the world we live in.
00:07:41.040 | Right?
00:07:42.040 | So, but it's a funny thing, but on some level that is true of meditation.
00:07:47.280 | It's like, you can't get there from here.
00:07:50.120 | Like the sense of you, the sense of you as subject isn't brought along to this thing
00:07:56.080 | you're looking for.
00:07:57.080 | Right?
00:07:58.080 | Like you're like, you're, you know, it's almost like, it's almost like you're, you're making
00:08:02.620 | a fist and you're trying to get to an open hand.
00:08:08.600 | The fist doesn't get to take that journey as a fist.
00:08:13.120 | Right?
00:08:14.120 | Like you don't, the fist doesn't go along for the ride.
00:08:15.720 | The fist comes apart.
00:08:18.280 | Right?
00:08:19.280 | And on some level that our subjectivity is a kind of an intent, an attentional fist.
00:08:25.800 | You know, it's, it, it is a contraction of energy.
00:08:28.480 | Again, it's, it's so much bound up in thought for, for most of us, most of the time that
00:08:34.960 | is.
00:08:35.960 | And when, when properly inspected, there's just this, you know, evaporation of the starting
00:08:42.040 | point, but there's not this, there's not this fulfillment of, I'm going to get this fist
00:08:46.600 | is going to, just going to, if I, you know, if life gets good enough, if I get concentrated
00:08:52.040 | enough, focused enough, you know, if I austere enough, if I renounce enough, if I desire
00:08:57.520 | less, if I, you know, you know, enough with enough good intentions, this fist is going
00:09:03.480 | to move into some sort of sublime condition, right?
00:09:06.640 | That's not the logic of the process.