The True Purpose of Meditation | Dr. Sam Harris & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | So, the illusoriness of the self doesn't cut against any of those obvious facts.
00:00:07.620 | So the sense of self that is illusory, and again, we might want to talk about self in
00:00:13.200 | other modes because there's just a lot of interest there psychologically and ultimately
00:00:19.600 | scientifically.
00:00:23.380 | The thing that doesn't exist, it certainly doesn't exist as it seems, and I would want
00:00:27.860 | to argue that it actually is just a proper illusion, is the sense that there is a subject
00:00:35.860 | interior to experience, in addition to experience.
00:00:39.580 | So most people feel like they're having an experience of the world, and they're having
00:00:44.160 | an experience of their bodies in the world.
00:00:47.060 | And in addition to that, they feel that they are a subject internal to the body, and very
00:00:53.500 | likely in the head.
00:00:54.660 | Most people feel like they're behind their face as a kind of locus of awareness and thought
00:00:59.900 | and intention, and it's almost like you're a passenger inside your body.
00:01:07.420 | Most people don't feel identical to their bodies, and they can imagine, and this is
00:01:11.180 | sort of the origin, the psychological origin, the folk psychological origin of a sense that
00:01:18.260 | there might be a soul that could survive the death of the body.
00:01:21.100 | Most people are what my friend Paul Bloom calls common-sense dualists, right?
00:01:26.700 | The default expectation seems to be that whatever the relationship between the mind and the
00:01:33.080 | body, there's some promise of separability there, right?
00:01:39.700 | And whenever you really push hard on the science side and say, "Well, no, the mind is really
00:01:45.380 | just what the brain is doing," that begins to feel more and more counterintuitive to
00:01:49.860 | people, and there still seems some residual mystery that, you know, at death, maybe something
00:01:56.420 | is going to lift off the brain and go elsewhere, right?
00:01:58.620 | So there's this sense of dualism that many people have, and obviously that's supported
00:02:03.700 | by many religious beliefs.
00:02:07.380 | But this feeling, it's a very peculiar starting point.
00:02:13.160 | People feel that, you know, they don't feel identical to their experience, right?
00:02:18.580 | It's a matter of experience.
00:02:19.860 | They feel like they're on the edge of experience, somehow appropriating it from the side.
00:02:25.940 | You're kind of on the edge of the world, and the world is out there.
00:02:29.600 | Your body is, in some sense, an object in the world, which, you know, it's different
00:02:35.380 | from the world.
00:02:36.380 | You know, the boundary of your skin is still meaningful.
00:02:38.900 | You can sort of loosely control your body.
00:02:41.900 | I mean, you can't control it.
00:02:42.900 | You can control your gross, you know, and subtle, you know, voluntary motor movements,
00:02:47.620 | but you can't, you're not controlling everything your body is doing.
00:02:51.740 | You're not controlling your heartbeat and your, you know, your hormonal secretions and
00:02:57.140 | all of that.
00:02:58.140 | And so there's a lot that's going on that is in the dark for you.
00:03:01.780 | And then you give someone an instruction to meditate, say, and you say, "Okay, let's examine
00:03:08.580 | all of this from the first person's side.
00:03:10.220 | Let's look for this thing you're calling I."
00:03:13.780 | And again, I is not identical to the body.
00:03:16.540 | People feel like their hands are out there, and if they're going to meditate, they're
00:03:19.600 | going to close their eyes, very likely, and now they're going to pay attention to something.
00:03:23.420 | They're going to pay attention to the breath or to sounds.
00:03:26.980 | And it's from the point of view of being a locus of attention that is now aiming attention
00:03:32.100 | strategically at an object like the breath, that there's this dualism that is set up.
00:03:38.180 | And ultimately, the ultimate promise of meditation, I mean, there are really two levels at which
00:03:44.300 | you could be interested in meditation.
00:03:48.140 | One is, you know, very straightforward and remedial and non-paradoxical and very well
00:03:53.140 | subscribed and it's the usual set of claims about all the benefits you're going to get
00:03:58.140 | from meditation, right?
00:03:59.140 | So you're going to lower your stress and you're going to increase your focus and you're going
00:04:02.260 | to, you know, stave off cortical thinning and there's all kinds of good things that
00:04:05.980 | science is saying meditation will give you.
00:04:11.520 | And none of that entails really drilling down on this paradoxical claim that the self is
00:04:16.100 | an illusion or anything else of that sort.
00:04:19.820 | But from my point of view, the real purpose of meditation and its real promise is not
00:04:25.740 | in this long list of benefits.
00:04:27.340 | And, you know, I'm not discounting any of those, though, you know, the science for many
00:04:32.180 | of them is quite provisional.
00:04:35.120 | It's in this deeper claim that if you look for this thing you're calling I, if you look
00:04:39.780 | for the sense that there's a thinker in addition to the mirror rising of the next thought,
00:04:46.820 | say, you won't find that thing.
00:04:49.340 | And you can, what's more, you can not find it in a way that's conclusive and that matters,
00:04:56.220 | right?
00:04:57.220 | And it has a, there's a host of benefits that follow from that discovery, which are quite
00:05:05.440 | a bit deeper and more interesting than engaging meditation on the side of its benefits, you
00:05:09.840 | know, de-stressing, increasing focus and all the rest.
00:05:12.540 | [Music]