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Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge my guest is Sam Harris. And I’m so pleased to have this opportunity, Sam, to talk with you. You write and talk about a wide range of topics including the problems with faith, morality, free will, secular enlightenment, gun ownership, the dangers of the Islamic religion, and more. And what really impresses me is not so much the wide range, but you’re what I would call a stand-up guy. You stand up for your convictions, and you speak to them truthfully from your experience, from your knowing. And I really respect that, and I’m really excited to have this conversation with you.
Let me just tell you a little bit more about Sam. He’s the author of five New York Times bestsellers, neuroscientist philosopher, host of the widely acclaimed Making Sense podcast, and he’s the creator of the Waking Up app for people who want to learn to meditate in a modern scientific context. Sam, welcome.
Sam Harris: Thank you. Thank you. It’s great to meet you. Happy to be here.
TS: Wonderful to meet you too. I’m surprised that it’s taken so long for our life paths to converge for right here this moment, but I’m so happy that we’re on. OK—
SH: Well, I heard your voice somewhere, I think it was probably on your own podcast, and I thought, “If ever there was a great podcasting voice, this is a voice I have to meet.” So it can’t be the first time you’ve heard this, but you’ve just got this amazing, timeless radio voice. So congratulations.
TS: Thank you. Thank you. Came with the body and everything.
SH: Yeah.
TS: It came with it. So about 10 years ago, I hosted a 23-part interview series called Waking Up: What Does It Really Mean? And the thing that astonished me the most after doing 23 interviews is that people didn’t answer the same way. I was shocked. I was like, “Wow, people use the same word—waking up, spiritual awakening—and they mean different things by it.” So I wanted to start there and hear precisely what Sam Harris means by “waking up.”
SH: Yeah, well, it can mean a few things. I think the center of the bullseye for me, and this is really the direct influence of non-dual teachings in Buddhism and the Indian tradition on me, this is really Dzogchen and Advaita, it’s not that those two schools think they teach precisely the same thing, but I basically think they do, albeit the methods are different, but I think the goal is the same, and the goal is really to recognize that the sense of self, the sense that there’s a subject in the middle of experience that to whom experience refers that there’s an eye that is appropriate in experience, it’s not identical to experience, but it’s on the edge of it or in the middle of it, the subject in the head, that’s an illusion, right? So you’re waking up from the dream of subject-object perception, and especially certainly when you’re talking about the mechanics of psychological suffering, you’re waking up from the dream of identification with thought, right?
The sense that this next arising thought is what you are subjectively, right? And this is not something that people would necessarily assert conceptually. I mean most people, and certainly most educated people in the West, people who believe that we’ve understood something scientifically about the nature of ourselves, they’re not going to think that they really are identical to their thoughts or they’re going to think they’re identical to their bodies probably. And if they’re religious in any sense that they think they’re identical to their souls inside their bodies, very likely. But there’s this sense of feeling identical to thought that really is the default state for most of us. The thoughts sneak up upon us unawares and we just, they inhabit us. And obviously in meditation you learn to recognize them as appearances and consciousness, but unrecognized strangely, this next piece of language or this next image, this next memory, this next judgment, this next kindling opinion just feels like me, right? It just feels like, OK, there’s no subjective distance between me and the voice in my head, which is thinking this next thought. And that’s the default state.
And that really is in many ways deeply analogous to being asleep and dreaming and not knowing that you’re dreaming. When we go to sleep, we fall into a dream state. I think the most remarkable thing about dreams is that we’re totally unsurprised to suddenly find ourselves in this new condition, right? You’re safely in your bed, you fall asleep, and then however many minutes later, in subjective time it’s more or less instantaneous, you’re somewhere else, you are surrounded by other people. They’re people you’ve never met or famous people or dead people. And unless it’s a lucid dream, unless you have some reality testing going on that links it to your waking state, the most remarkable thing is that we don’t even notice this transition and we have no sense that the laws of physics have been suspended for us, that our psychological continuity has been interrupted. We’re just ready to feel that we are the subject in the next circumstance.
And something like that happens with thought more or less every moment of our waking lives, we just are born away by this voice in our heads or by this stream of imagery, and it totally defines our sense of being in the world. I mean, if you think a thought of self-hatred or you think a thought of regret or you think of the person who died who you deeply miss, and if you have no perspective on those thoughts, all of a sudden that is you, that is your emotional state, that is your life. And it’s very strange that thought has this kind of power over us. I’m not saying that thought is something we want to get rid of. Obviously thought is quite necessary for our functioning as human beings, but it is the mechanism that delivers virtually all of our psychological suffering and meditation offers a way to break that spell.
TS: Sam Harris is not the thinker. You’re waking up from something, I get that, from identification with thought and with being the thinker.
So there’s a waking up from, but what about the waking up to? What do you discover you are? How would you language that?
SH: Well, I tend to use the word “consciousness” or “awareness.” I use those synonyms for what remains when you’re not shattering experience with concepts. So see, there really is just consciousness and its contents, and the contents are in some basic sense indivisible from consciousness itself, right? This is a very traditional view in Advaita or in Dzogchen or in Mahamudra or even Zen. I mean, any non-dual school would give you some version of this where you have this condition that is the basis of all experience, all subjectivity, the feeling that it’s like something to be what you are is consciousness. And this would be no less true even if you were radically confused about everything. I mean, even if this is all a dream, even if this is all an illusion, even if nothing is as it seems, there is this seeming, there is this experience of something, and for lack of a better word, many of us call that consciousness or awareness. And everything you can experience is appearing in that space.
And I should be clear, I’m not making any metaphysical claims about this. I’m not saying that consciousness is the foundation of all reality, that it proceeded the Big Bang, say. I’m not saying that insight into non-duality teaches you anything about cosmology, right? It clearly doesn’t, right? So I think we can bracket all of those metaphysical questions about how consciousness relates to the brain or the physical universe, those are very interesting. I get that they’re consequential for certain questions and we haven’t figured all of that out yet, obviously, but it really doesn’t matter for the claims I’m making about the possibilities of experience and about the nature of human suffering.
So you can bracket the metaphysics. I’m happy to talk about it if it interests you, but I just want to be clear that I am talking about the nature of experience and what can be realized from the first person side if you simply pay close attention to what it’s like to be you.
TS: Right. But here’s where I’d love to understand a little bit more from your perspective. In the waking up process, there’s this discovery of consciousness or awareness that isn’t touched by the contents that come and go. And yet you’re over there wherever you are. What geography are you in? I’m over here. We have different experiences, perspectives. There’s a uniqueness of Sam Harris, the stand-up guy that I mentioned, and Tami Simon with the radio voice. How do you understand that?
SH: Well, I think that it’s obvious that the consciousness of contents and our minds is… these things, these phenomena are in some unavoidable sense born of our body and our entanglement with the world, right? I mean, I don’t think you can be a… Again, I would like to bracket the metaphysics because I’m somewhat agnostic about the final answers here. It’s pretty clear we don’t know them. So consciousness for me is distinct from mind in the sense that it still remains a mystery as to how it relates to neurophysiology. But mind itself, right, the functions of a human mind, our ability to process language, our ability to map the physical world and our visual field onto our visual cortex, right, I mean, all of that is clearly based on what the brain is doing, right? We know through now about 150 years of neurology and emerging neuroscience and psychology that the mind as such isn’t independent of the brain, right?
So the information processing of the brain really is creating a lot of the phenomenon that we can be conscious of. So this is, again, slightly confusing, but I would hold consciousness itself aside, the fact that it’s like something to have a mind, the fact that it’s like something to be what you are, I would hold that aside as still a remaining mystery.
But as to the phenomenon, what it’s like to be you is powerfully dependent upon you as a physical system over there, wherever you are, right? And so it is for me. So the fact that I don’t wake up with your memories and you don’t wake up with mine, that’s not a mystery from my point of view. I mean your memories are encoded in the neural substrate of your brain, right? Now, whether we could copy them onto the hard drive of some future computer, that’s an open question. This is all interesting and questions about progress in AI come here. And if in fact, consciousness is just an emergent property of information processing on some level, well then questions of conscious AI will one day be something we have to entertain. But again, that’s still not yet known.
So from my point of view, consciousness itself is in some ways deeply impersonal because the thing that would make it personal is the specifics of its contents, right? My consciousness is I would imagine totally identical to yours, except for the fact that over here it’s populated by my memories and my pains and pleasures, and attitudes, et cetera. And that again is not a mystery because the only place my particular pain in my knee can appear is over here where my knee is, and in the nervous system that is mapping the inputs to my knee, in the cortex of my brain.
And it certainly seems that not every part of the human brain is producing conscious experience. I mean, again, this is another mystery. It’s still not entirely mapped, and I can’t be entirely confident of this. I mean, it’s possible that parts of the brain that we think are consciously dark may in fact be conscious in ways that would surprise us. But certainly at the gross level, it seems that the totality of what I can be conscious of as a mind is a subset of the neural activity that’s occurring in my brain and perhaps a smallish subset. I mean, there’s a lot that my brain is doing that I can’t inspect consciously. And the truth is, as a matter of my conscious experience, I can’t even tell that I have a brain, right? That’s a pretty big blind spot. I mean, there’s no experience you’re going to have in meditation that is going to deliver the details of neurophysiology, and it won’t even deliver the fact that your brain exists or really plays any role at all in driving your experience.
So subjectively, we don’t have a perfect idea of what we are in our totality, but I would argue that again, that doesn’t really matter for when we’re talking about the promise of meditation and the nature of the self, the kinds of illusions we’re taken in by and the way in which they produce suffering for us.
TS: OK, let me ask you a few direct questions here, because when it comes to putting meditation—
SH: Am I avoiding the topic somehow?
TS: No, no, but I want to generate greater clarity for myself. When it comes to meditating in a, quote unquote, “rational or scientific context,” a couple of times you’ve used the word, mystery, and I’m wondering from your perspective, what exists in the realm of mystery that we don’t know the answers to when it comes to 21st century secular enlightenment? We just don’t know. That’s a mystery, even though we’re being very rational here.
SH: Well, and hopefully I would give you two different types of mystery and one I think we never get rid of. So there are ordinary mysteries where it really is a statement, as you just made, of us just not having the right information. We don’t understand something conceptually, and we will one day understand it. There was a time where we had no idea how people got sick and we didn’t know about viruses, we didn’t know about bacteria. And then we learned something about that, the germ theory of disease, and you wash your hands before surgery, et cetera, and we made progress. And so certain mysteries got resolved there, and there are yet further ones that we need to resolve.
That kind of mystery for the topic of this conversation relates to consciousness itself. The fact that there’s something that is like to be what we are, the fact that the lights are on in any sense, how that is emerging out of information processing in the brain or any other physical system that is a, or even the fact that it is emerging, I mean it’s possible that it goes deeper than information processing, it’s possible that there’s something that it’s like to be an electron, and we just don’t know that, that’s a genuine mystery. We don’t understand the so-called neural correlates of consciousness. There are theories about this. Some don’t make a lot of sense even at first glance, but none are persuasive enough at this point for me to say as a neuroscientist or a philosopher of mind, that we are confident that we know how consciousness relates to the brain or to any physical system, and this has certain consequences.
For instance, I think we will build increasingly advanced AI, we will eventually build truly humanoid robots that strike us as utterly compelling, and we’ll design them in such a way so as to seem conscious. And if we haven’t figured out how consciousness actually relates to information processing, we won’t know whether they’re conscious. And I think this is a very interesting and potentially ethically fraught situation that we are going to find ourselves in I think in probably a few short years, I mean maybe 10 years or 15 years at the outset. So consciousness, just how it arises is a mystery.
But I would argue that there are other sorts of mysteries or another principle of mystery that we really never dispel in science. And it relates to the nature of just what it’s like to be conscious from the first person side. And it’s that on some basic level are conceptual understanding of things, doesn’t really reach into the core of experience, and dispel mystery. So you can look at any ordinary object and you can look at your hand or you can look at a cup on your desk, and if you just pay close attention to it and ask yourself what is it? As those seeing it for the first time, gaze upon this object and ask yourself what is it? You’ll find that you have a lot of language you can throw at it, right? You can begin thinking about how this thing relates to other things. You have a name for it. You can keep reiterating that name in your mind. You can say hand over and over again. But that doesn’t really reach into the thing itself. There’s a kind of suchness to any experience, even the most ordinary experience that is intrinsically mysterious.
There’s just this mystery of being that begins to shine through everything. And that is itself the mystery of consciousness, the mystery that anything is appearing at all, right? And I would say that the mystery of consciousness presents us in every moment with the subjective version of the fundamental mystery of the cosmos, which is why is there something rather than nothing? Why is anything here? Why are there laws of nature? I mean, it is not enough to say, “OK, we’ve begun to understand the laws of nature and they have produced everything that we can be aware of,” but why is there anything including the laws of nature, right, that’s I think an irreducible mystery?
And I do think consciousness, why is there anything that it’s like to be what you are presents the subjective version of that mystery. It’s just, it is irreducibly mysterious that the lights are on. And I don’t think, even if we understand consciousness conceptually, I don’t think this is the so-called hard problem of consciousness and philosophy of mind, I think it will always seem like a miracle to us. I don’t think there’s a way of describing unconscious complexity and asserting that some pattern there produces consciousness that’s going to be self-explanatory, that’s going to seem like it should have been intuitively obvious that, OK, well that explains consciousness, now I get it, right? I don’t think we’re going to have that experience.
And it’s important to point out that for that purpose, consciousness is unlike any other phenomenon we’ve ever sought to explain scientifically. I mean, there are things that we thought we would never explain and we’ve explained them, things like life, right? I mean, people thought life just, you can’t explain life. And there was a point where we had this notion of an élan vital, life essence or life spirit that would differentiate an inanimate object from an inanimate one or a dead organism from a live one.
But now we know that life can be defined in terms of how systems function, and whether they metabolize energy, whether they grow, et cetera, whether they reproduce? And we have all these extrinsic criteria that demarcate living systems from dead ones. And there are certain cases where it’s arbitrary, and we are not even sure whether something’s alive or not. Like in the case of a virus, I don’t think we’ve decided whether we think viruses are alive or not. Really, they’re at the boundary. But consciousness is intrinsically what it is from its own side, right? Consciousness, it’s not defined, and I would argue it cannot be defined from the outside. I mean, there’s no evidence of consciousness in brains. There’s no evidence of consciousness in the universe apart from the fact that we know it to exist from its own side in our direct experience.
And so I would say that even if we’re confused about everything, consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can’t be an illusion, right? Because even if everything isn’t illusory, even if we’re in the matrix or if our brains’ in vats, I mean we’re just totally confused about what we are, this seeming appearance demonstrates the reality of consciousness as much as any veridical appearance could.
So I mean, consciousness is the ground truth of our being moment to moment. And again, I’m not making metaphysics out of that, but I think it is from the point of view of our flourishing as conscious creatures I think realizing this and experiencing it more deeply is the most important thing we can learn to do.
TS: I’m curious to hear your perspective when it comes to appreciating the mystery of consciousness, but applying rational analysis to things that people report. I interview a lot of people who share with me things like, “This tree told me X, Y, Z,” or “I met an angel in my room when I woke up at three in the morning who told me this or that.”
And I’ve had a willingness myself to be open and just hear their reports and accept their reports for what they are, their experience without knowing what’s actually happening. Are they tapping into some collective—I’m going to project—I don’t know. And I’m curious, how would you apply your neurobiological rational lens to such reports?
SH: Well again, I’m open-minded on many questions of just how spooky this universe might be. I’m not a dogmatic materialist. I mean, I think you’re on firm ground if you want to claim to be a materialist or a physicalist in science. But I’ve always been open on the question of psychic phenomenon and rebirth and all that stuff is something that I think is worth patiently entertaining, right? But some of it, I mean, certainly psychic phenomenon would be among the most easily tested things we could ever get our hands on in the lab. I mean, so it really is a… it should be a concern for anyone who wants to believe in many of these things that they have not been demonstrated in the lab.
I mean, something like telepathy, say, I mean and this is an experience many of us think we’ve had. You knew exactly what this person was going to say, or you knew who was calling. This person hasn’t called you in four years and the phone rang and you immediately thought of them, and that was them lo and behold, right?
We know many things about this. One, we know we’re very bad judges of the probability of events, and we know that a very low probability of events happen all the time. There are one in a billion probability of events that are going to happen to you today, and you’re just not going to notice them as some super low probability. And we know we keep score really badly. We know in this case, you’re not keeping score of all the times the phone rings and you don’t know who’s calling and you just pick it up and then you find out who’s calling. You’re noticing the one time in a month where you knew who was calling. And the truth is, you don’t know that many people. There are not that many people who call in the first place. And so there are ways that we just know we’re bad consumers of these kinds of synchronicities and coincidences, and we’re readily given to superstitious interpretations. So we should be skeptical of our impulses there.
But as I was saying, a phenomenon like this, like telepathy in particular, should be absolutely trivially easy to test in the lab. So the fact that some psychic hasn’t strolled into Harvard and gotten their powers demonstrated by legitimate scientists, the fact that when you ask them they are disinclined to do this because they would not want to… it would be selling out, they wouldn’t want to so crassly demonstrate their powers in such a context. All of that is just an obvious dodge. And my feeling is is that if anyone had these powers in any significance, if it wasn’t just a tiny departure from randomness over the course of thousands of trials, which is the laboratory result that some people claim shows that people have these powers to some degree, if someone really had them, if someone really could read your mind, could really tell the future, you could really remotely view things clairvoyantly, right, they would recognize that they would do humanity a lot of good by demonstrating these powers because it would completely change our worldview, right?
So if your favorite guru, whether it’s Sathya Sai Baba, or anyone else really had these powers, it’s just a lie to say that it was just spiritually uncouth for them not to demonstrate them in a lab, but they could demonstrate them for their credulous devotees in India where nobody’s really thinking as clearly about this situation and everyone’s desperate to believe. So that, so while I really am open-minded about these things, many of these things are eminently testable, and the fact that they haven’t been shown to exist is the dog that didn’t bark spiritually here. I mean, it should be of concern to people who believe these things.
And there are other things to point out. Someone who thinks they’ve seen a ghost, they woke up in the middle of the night and someone was standing at the foot of their bed, right? Well, we know that sleep is associated with all kinds of unusual experiences, and we know, I mean, obviously the most common one is just dreaming, which we all do or most of us do most nights, whether we remember it or not. And we know from dreaming that our brains, our minds have the power to fully create whole worlds for us and people them with apparently sentient beings who act totally autonomously. When you’re in a dream and you don’t know it’s a dream and you’re talking to your dead friend, you don’t know what he’s going to say, you feel like you’re talking to your friend, you’re every bit as surprised by the words coming out of his mouth as you are in the waking state with a living person.
So we know that it’s possible for the mind to fully fabricate that kind of situation. And so if someone told me that they woke up at 3:00 a.m. and there was someone standing, there was an ethereal presence at the foot of their bed and that it said something interesting and then wandered away is the best explanation of that, that there really are ghosts or spirits or genies or et cetera, or is it that the mind has the power to superimpose that dream-like phenomenology onto the waking state or the seeming waking state, or maybe this person was just having a dream. I’ve had all kinds of weird dreams, and I’ve had—
TS: Sure—
SH: Dreams where I was having a conversation like this, and I didn’t know I was dreaming. I had a dream where I was trying to convince people that this might be a dream that we’re all in, and I didn’t know I was dreaming. The people I’m talking to are looking at me like, “Yeah, yeah, we get it. This might be a dream.” And then I woke up, right? I mean, dreams are actually states quite analogous to psychosis. I mean, you don’t know what you’re about unless it’s a lucid dream. You don’t know where you are. You don’t know who anyone is. I mean, you’re totally mad, really. And yet this is a normal state of perfectly normal brains every night of the week for hours, right?
TS: Sure—
SH: It’s quite amazing.
TS: Well, you made a bold prediction, Sam, about how there are going to be robots that look and seem very human-like in not so many years, and I’m going to go ahead and make a bold prediction that I think we’re going to have a lot more science related to subtle energy healing, subtle body phenomenon, psychic phenomenon. I think it’s coming. So let’s see. I’m going to leave it open like that, but I’m going to give myself a whole decade for all the necessary fundraising and testing to come forward to impress you. We’ll see.
- Here’s what I want to know from you. You said the most important thing from your perspective is this discovery of consciousness, this dimension of our experience. I’d like to know from you how that has changed you, if you will, and how you vacillate within yourself from having that connection to that unalloyed, untarnishable state and then being like, oh, Sam identified with his thoughts and emotions person? Where you are in that process and how this discovery has changed you?
SH: Well, it’s changed me quite fundamentally because it’s given me a perspective on my suffering and my wellbeing. I mean, just what it means to live a good life, how I depart from that experience moment by moment. It’s just given a totally different perspective on the deepest questions of how to be happy in this world. And it’s a perspective that it just would be impossible to have by merely thinking about it, by merely having new beliefs or new opinions or new thoughts to lay over your experience.
It’s not a matter of believing anything. It’s a kind of skill on some level. It’s being able to pay attention in a certain way and notice something very specific about the nature of all conscious experience of experience in any moment, whether it’s just an ordinary experience of just having a conversation like this or you’re checking your email, or if it’s just a peak experience, I mean an experience you might have on psychedelics or in some altered state. This is always there to be noticed. And again, this is the fact that there’s really no self in the middle of experience. There’s no thinker of our thoughts. There’s no one to which it all refers. There’s just experience. There’s just this openness in which everything is appearing, and as such, there’s no problem with it really, the moment you notice that you’re noticing what it’s like when you’re no longer grasping at what’s pleasant or pushing what’s unpleasant away, so there’s an equanimity intrinsic to that recognition.
So it’s given me this capacity to the moment I notice I’m suffering, the moment I notice that I’m contracting, I’m unhappy, I’m reacting negatively to experience, it gives me an alternative to the usual, to the default response, which is to locate the source of my pain and unhappiness out in the world. So somebody does something that annoys me and I’m reacting to that person as this unpleasant stimulus. Someone cuts me off in traffic or someone says something that I find offensive, whatever it is, and I begin to contract and react, and I’m disposed as everyone is just now begin to figure out how to rearrange the world so as to make me happier. There is an alternative. And the alternative is to recognize that the actual source of your suffering in that moment is you, is something you’re doing. It’s something you’re not seeing. It’s something you’re now collapsing into. It’s almost like a muscular contraction. It’s like you’re pinching yourself and you’re wondering why you’re uncomfortable.
So the meditative journey really is one of becoming more and more sensitive to that process and more and more honest about it, and to relinquish that reactivity sooner and sooner so that the half-life of one’s departures from a feeling of wellbeing, the half-life of one’s anxiety and anger and impatience and whatever the negative emotion is, becomes much, much shorter because the moment it arises, it becomes a kind of mindfulness alarm, and then you are beginning to punctuate it with just moments of clear seeing of just which breaks the link between thought and you’re no longer thinking about what a jerk that guy is, you’re just noticing the physiology of anger and patience begin to dissipate.
The non-dual side, I mean, what I just described there is even possible with a dualistic practice of mindfulness, you can still feel like a subject in the head and pay scrupulous attention to the arising of thought and the arising of emotion and delink them by just patiently noticing them and let the negative mental state just dissipate on its own. And so that is a kind of superpower you can get even when you’re practicing dualistically and you still feel like you are the meditator doing something. The non-dual part allows you to recognize that consciousness is free even before the character of experience has changed. So even before the physiology of anger has dissipated, the moment you recognize there’s no center to it, there’s just this condition of freedom, you’re free of self, you’re free of a problem, and yes, the anger will dissipate again over the course of seconds, but your freedom there is no longer a contingent upon it’s dissipating, right? It’s just energy.
I mean, this actually is where Tantra, which I’ve never explicitly practiced, but which comes in here, I mean Tantra, as you probably know, is a system of practice where you begin to use these energy states, even classically negative energy states like anger, you just contact them as raw energy and they on this account begin to arise as bliss. I mean, you can begin to just contact the pure energetics of even negative emotions and use that, bend them back into meditative energy and expand your mind that way. Well, a non-dual recognition essentially accomplishes that where it’s just energy. Like the anger, the moment the center drops out doesn’t have the psychological implications it had a moment before and it is just energy and there’s nothing to do with it.
So as to how often I vacillate between these kinds of conditions where I’m recognizing consciousness without center or I’m getting identified with thought and reacting and contracting, this happens thousands of times a day. I mean, I’m certainly not stable in this recognition of non-duality, but the crucial change in me that happened once I started practicing this way, and this was after some years of practicing dualistically with some real diligence, I mean I probably spent about a year on silent retreat mostly on vipassana retreats in increments of three months to two months, to one month, to one week. I mean, I did lots of retreats of various lengths, again, mostly in a vipassana context. Even after a year of doing that, I still wasn’t able to practice this way.
I mean, it wasn’t until I spent some time explicitly getting non-dual teachings in the Dzogchen tradition with some great lamas in Nepal and I spent some time with some Advaita teachers in India. I mean, just for me, Dzogchen was the crucial piece, I mean and specifically the teachings I got with Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, who’s this, really just the most wonderful meditation teacher I really have ever met, just in terms of the skill with which he pointed out the nature of mind. It wasn’t until I got those teachings that I could say this about my practice, which is that any moment of mindfulness for me is now synonymous with noticing the illusoriness of the self or the centralistness of consciousness or non-dual awareness, depending on how you want to describe it, or the Buddhist concept of emptiness, right? I mean, these are slightly different concepts, but they’re naming the same experience from a different angle.
Whereas before, when I was practicing mindfulness, again, even very diligently, I mean on a silent retreat where you’re doing nothing but you’re in silence for months and you’re doing nothing but practice and you’re just trying to link one moment of mindfulness to the next, it was true of me to say for most of that time that I could be mindful in a way that was not delivering this insight into the illusoriness of the self. I still felt like a subject paying attention to objects. I still felt like there was somebody meditating. And so the hallmark for me of non-dualism is for your mindfulness to become synonymous with the cutting through of that illusion. And it just becomes the…
So that’s the first time in practice where one can honestly say that one doesn’t have a goal any longer in practice, one’s not trying to get anywhere because in each moment of mindfulness, you really are arriving at the goal. And in Dzogchen they talk about taking the goal as the path. And in my view, in my experience, that’s not just hype, that really is what differentiates that kind of practice from other styles of practice.
TS: I’d like to learn more specifically, if you’re able to share it with us, what happened when you were studying with Tulku Urgyen because you wrote about it and you said, “The instruction I received from him was without question the most important thing I’ve ever been explicitly taught by another human being.” And I wonder if you can say more about this cutting through and the technique specifically that you learned.
SH: Yeah. Well, so in the Dzogchen tradition, which your listeners might be familiar with, it is one of the strands of non-dual teaching within Vajrayana Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Mahamudra is the other. And Madhyamaka is a philosophical system there, which gets at the same condition of emptiness from another side. But I think you can spend a lot of time studying that philosophy without getting the point. Dzogchen is often described and held as a secret teaching within Vajrayana Buddhism.
And the reasons for that secrecy are, I mean there… It’s an approach to teaching that I don’t necessarily agree with. And to some degree in my own work, I have jailbroken the Dzogchen teachings to some degree, certainly in Waking Up, the app, I mean I give my version of these teachings. And again, I do think the same thing is being taught by non-dual teachers in the Indian tradition, the Advaita tradition.
When I spent time with Poonjaji who, I mean you may have spoken to some of his teachers who are teaching his style of inquiry, he was a disciple of Ramana Maharshi who was teaching this sort of thing, I studied with Ramesh Balsekar very briefly and he was a disciple of Nisargadatta Maharaj who was certainly teaching this sort of thing. Again, people get misled by some of the superficial differences in the language. In the Advaita tradition, people talk about sometimes they talk about the Self, capital S, and assert the reality of this grander self, and that is just anathema in any kind of Buddhist language game, right? I mean, Buddhism is all about the illusoriness of the self and non-self and emptiness.
So there’s an emphasis on negation in Buddhism, and in the Advaita tradition, there can be a kind of assertion of some spiritual reality. And these two things can seem quite discordant, but I don’t in fact think they are. But what I will say is that there are differences in the methods, there are differences in the conceptual clarity in various traditions, and there are even differences within a tradition between the ways in which various teachers teach it to the same view. And in my experience, Tulku Urgyen was really unique in the clarity with which he did this. And I can’t just totally recapitulate what he said, but—
TS: Not what he said, but what you heard.
SH: Yeah, I mean, the crucial principles are that… So I guess one more thing I should say by way of preliminary throat clearing. In the Tibetan tradition there it’s taught that you have to do a lot of preliminary practice to prepare yourself to be ready to receive the Dzogchen teachings. They don’t just teach it to anyone who walks through the door. And again, they have reasons for this, and I am not sure I agree with all the reasons, but one reason is clearly valid, which is, you need a modicum of concentration and mindfulness to be able to do what is being asked of you and to pay attention in the requisite way so as to have the necessary insight.
So if you haven’t practiced enough mindfulness, if you haven’t done enough meditation of some kinds to teach you the difference between being lost in thought and paying attention to something, whatever it is, a mantra, a visualization, whatever, if you haven’t exercised that muscle enough, well then when a Dzogchen master of whatever skill is pointed out to you, you’re just going to be confused. You’re just not going to be able to thread the needle you’re being asked to thread.
And the analogy I have given many times to people in a Western secular scientific context is to noticing the optic blind spot. This is something that most high school kids at some point gets shown. And so almost everyone is familiar with this. The blind spot is highly non-obvious. You can’t see it until you’re shown how to see it. And this little experiment entails a piece of paper where you draw a small fixation cross and then a dot to one side, and you close one eye, and then you move the paper closer to your eye, to the point where while staring at the fixation cross the dot on the periphery of your visual field disappears. And as you interrogate this, as you move the paper back and forth, you can assure yourself that this is not an illusion, you’re not hallucinating, you can play with this for an hour and a half if need be, but you can assure yourself that, OK, there really is this area in the retina where you’re not getting any conscious information because the dot keeps vanishing.
And this is just a curious thing to discover. Doesn’t have any great implications for how we live our lives, obviously. But it’s there to be discovered, and yet it’s overlooked routinely by everyone. And obviously there are many people on earth who don’t know anything about this and will never see it. And what’s interesting is that it’s when you think about how far away is this insight, when you’re showing the blind spot and you’re doing this practice of just moving the paper and noticing the dot vanish and reemerge, it is true to say that the insight is right on the surface. It’s almost too close to you to be seen, right? It’s not far away. It’s not deep within, it’s not this profound journey up to the mountaintop to get there, right? It’s right on the surface of things, it’s literally overlooked, right? It’s not deep.
So there’s an analogous structure to this insight into non-duality. We are, and this is one reason why I’ve been so critical, at least in certain contexts of dualistic practice, it’s not to say it’s not a necessary starting point for many of us, but it’s a misleading starting point for virtually all of us. We are led by the way we’re training our attention, whether it’s in a Buddhist vipassana context or in any other. We’re led to believe that spiritual progress and the meditative journey entails this search for subtlety. You’re going deep within, you’re getting closer and closer to increasingly refined objects of attention, and you get this sense, whether it’s explicitly stated or it’s just implicitly absorbed, you get this sense that freedom is elsewhere. You are at the base of the mountain and freedom really is at the top, and you have to schlep up the mountain, right? There’s no way you’re going to instantly be there. And so that’s where people start and that’s where people stay sometimes for their whole lives, either spiritually.
And so Dzogchen teaching and this pointing out of the nature of mind cuts through all of that. And again, it is not unique to Dzogchen it’s just, in my experience it was uniquely precise in the way it was communicated. But when I’d read Zen teachings or when I read Advaita or when I read even other Buddhist teachings that are often traditionally dualistic, but when the great masters of those teachings talk, I hear the same kind of pointing out, but it lacks a certain kind of precision, right?
And the one crucial thing that Tulku Urgyen emphasized was that when you look for what’s looking, when you try to turn attention upon itself, when you look for the looker, when you look for, to use Douglas Harding’s framing, which I don’t know if you’ve ever talked about Douglas on your podcast, but Douglas Harding was nominally Zen, but he was just this architect who came up with his own spiritual exercises, he talked about having no head. You look for your head and you fail to find it. Where your head is supposed to be, if you just look, you’ll see that there’s just the world. There’s just this openness in which everything’s appearing. So when you look, when you turn attention upon yourself and you try to find the subject, and in my experience this is easier to do with eyes open in the beginning, for reasons we could talk about, but it can be done with eyes opened or closed, when you look for the center of experience, it’s in the first instant that you will see that it’s not there.
This is not something you can do gradually. It’s not something that can take a minute or even a full second. It really is the moment you turn, and the turning doesn’t really ever get accomplished. It’s a gesture that is in some sense impossible to make. I mean, it is the attempt to make it that can reveal that there’s no center and there’s nothing to find. The moment you look for yourself, you’re looking at me now, you have a sense, you’re behind your face looking out your eyes at across space and at me as an object. But if you look for what’s looking while still looking at me, you look for what’s looking, in the first instant of looking you might find that there’s and perhaps only for an instant, this might only be true for half a second or less, there’s this moment where your relationship to the object changes, where you have no relationship to the object because you are no longer behind your face. You’re no longer a subject in relation to an object.
There’s just this totality of appearance and there’s no center to it, and you are identical to it, right? You’re not on the edge of it looking in. You look for what is looking, and it’s really brief. I mean, it’s a finger snap. It’s just in that first instant while you can still hear the echo of the finger snap, it’s that instant of the fresh open consideration of what’s there. Is there something to find? Is there one looking, or is there just this openness? Is there just this totality of energy and appearance?
So the crucial instruction, again, and I’m just vomiting a lot of words at you, but this is just to indicate where a person can find this. It’s the first moment of turning to look, right? And-
TS: Flash, feels like a flash.
SH: Yeah.
TS: To me.
SH: And the more you sensitize yourself to the qualities of that flash, you’re not trying to prolong it, you’re not trying to hold onto it. The moment it’s gone, the moment you find yourself lost in thought again or contracted back into the sense of self, well then just look again, right? It’s just, you just look.
And in Dzogchen, there’s this analogy to ringing a bell. You ring the bell just once. You just ring it once and let the natural duration of its tone dissipate, right? It’ll have whatever half-life, whatever duration it has. You don’t just keep hammering the bell to try to prolong the sound, right? You just ring it and just let that ring articulate the space of consciousness. Well, so you look and it lasts for however… so there’s something to resolve here, I mean, in Dzogchen it’s called resolving the view.
And there’s some stage at which you have to grow confident in it. It’s like, it’s possible. And I think this is why many Dzogchen teachers or the tradition itself guard against just casting all of these pearls before a swine is because some people can even have this experience. They can look for what’s looking. In Douglas Harding’s world, they can look for their head and they can have this curious moment of noticing this openness. There’s nothing to find. They have this feeling of, “Oh, I have no head.” For a moment, they have this clear sense that they don’t experience their head from the inside. There’s just the world.
But because they haven’t done enough practice, because they haven’t put themselves on the path up the mountain for long enough to really… to have struggled and to have prepared themself for the moment where they can recognize that this is actually the answer to their spiritual questions, because they haven’t posed the spiritual question in earnest, so when they’re given this answer, it doesn’t answer anything. So the liability there is that some people can walk away from even a genuine experience of this thinking, “Well, that’s just some kind of cocktail party trick. There’s just nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. It goes away after a second. What good is it,” right? So that is a liability. And I think Douglas Harding talked about, I think at one point he said, “The voice of the devil says, so what?” So there are people who have this experience who can say, so what?
And from a Dzogchen point of view, that really is a problem because it’s like, then the door of the Dharma closes for them because they’ve gotten what are ostensibly the most important secret teachings of the most esoteric tradition, and it just seemed like there was no there there, so what?. But if you’re someone who has meditated, if you’re someone who has struggled to understand how is it possible that the ego is an illusion, how does that make any sense, how is this notion of selflessness coherent at all, what could anyone mean by non-duality, right, I mean, if you’ve struggled over that and you’ve sat for hours and hours struggling to notice something worth noticing in your stream of being that could liberate you from your ordinary states of psychological suffering, well then when you glimpse this thing and begin to get used to it, then you can see that it meets actually all the spiritual tests that you would put to it? Then it actually does equalize experiences.
Then in the middle of an acid trip, you can look into this and notice, OK, in some basic sense, this insight into centerless openness equalizes even the full pyrotechnic display of the psychedelic experience with very ordinary experiences, just the experience of having a conversation or driving a car, right? In some basic sense, the beatific vision on acid is not that different from just looking at your hand, the moment you can notice that there’s no one looking, right? So there’s this equalization across experiences.
Anyway, I mean for me, the crucial insight was the necessary instantaneousness of the glimpse. And then that that glimpse is the thing you have to be mindful of. And it’s really easy. Again, once I had this experience and once I was able to practice in this way, then I saw every other spiritual instruction I’d ever been given as somehow fundamentally misleading. And the analogy I’ve given for this is, imagine you are told that the goal of spiritual life is to recognize your own face. You want to see your own face clearly. And now I’m going to give you a way to do that.
You’re going to walk up to a very still lake, and you’re going to see your face in the water. But the instruction I give you is to look deeply into the water, right? Now, we all know that if you’re going to see your face on the surface of the water, you got to look at the surface, right? And if your plane of focus is wrong, if you’re told about all the fish and the rocks and the algae, right, that are fascinating, and you look deep into the water, you’re looking right through the image of your face without seeing it, and you literally can’t see it? If you’re looking at the fish at the bottom, you cannot see your face.
And another analogy would be to be using a window as a mirror. You have a choice. You can look at your reflection on the surface of the window, or you can look through it into the house or out of the house at the rest of the world. If your plane of focus is wrong, you will not see it. And if your plane of focus is right, it takes no time to see it. There is no preliminary needed. You don’t have to build up any momentum and the sense that you have to build momentum, the sense that there’s a difference between all of the ethereal stuff you experience on retreat when you have a ton of concentration and your ordinary consciousness that is more fish at the bottom of the lake. That’s more of the illusion that you’re being taken in by dualistically.
And so I do view much of the instruction I got as a yogi for years by some of the best meditation teachers around as having been inadvertently but nonetheless fundamentally misleading on this point. I mean, there was something right on the surface to be seen and seen that that gives you the basis for a very different style of practice. And crucially, it’s a style of practice that wherein there is no more logic of hope and fear or goal orientation to be moved by because you’re not trying to get anywhere because the moment you look, you recognize there’s no one on this journey. There’s no other place to get to. There’s just consciousness and its contents, and those two are indivisible, right? There’s just this condition of appearances to which we’re identical.
And so that’s yeah, I mean, that was a very long-winded answer to your question, but I hope something was useful in there.
TS: Very useful. And it’s interesting, this notion of practicing in a headless way. I had heard an instruction from someone who’s featured on the Waking Up app—who’s also a teacher we feature heavily at Sounds True—Adyashanti, where he said, “Meditate from the neck down.” And this was something I heard when I was on retreat with him. And I practiced that way for a long time. And it wasn’t so much about the visual experience of being headless, but of the somatic sense, and just that even tuned me into what you’re saying about this headless path.
But OK, Sam, I have one more thing I want to ask you about, if it’s OK?
SH: Go for it.
TS: And this is because it’s important to me, which has to do with how consciousness without a center expresses itself ethically. And in your view, does it do so in a natural, spontaneous way without us having to go through and figure out our logical approach to wanting to create wellbeing for other people? Is there just this, I might call it quality of benevolence that is inherently emergent from consciousness, or do you not see it that way? Do we need to really figure out the implications of this action for this number of people in this social context, et cetera?
SH: Well, I think practically speaking, we do. I mean, whether or not the ultimate realization and stabilization of all of this gives you a perfectly ethically integrated mind and worldview, I mean I think I don’t see why you would be a jerk if in a moment to moment way the illusoriness of the self was just always obvious. I think there’s definitely something about emptiness and insight into selflessness that undercuts egocentricity by definition, but it doesn’t give you knowledge of the world by definition. And knowledge really does have significant ethical implications. It doesn’t tell you that you’d be a bad parent not to put a seatbelt on your kid if you don’t know what a seatbelt is, right? I mean, it is like if you-
TS: Sure—
SH: So it’s just there are things we learn and that get enshrined in culture, and all of these changes accumulate. And I think all of these things really do represent moral progress and all of this progress is important.
And when you just look at what is going to be true of most of us as practitioners, most of us are still, no matter how much we practice, most of us are going to spend each day lost in the dreamscape of thought. And we’re going to be thinking without clearly noticing that we’re thinking. And in that respect, it matters what we think. Our attitudes matter, our beliefs matter, our opinions matter. How seriously we take all that matters. So I think there is something to work out at the conceptual level for most of us, even for the longest time. And certainly when you see all these great gurus who have behaved terribly with their students over the years, there’s abundant evidence that culture and imperfect realization can be an engine of bad behavior given the right context, right? I mean, you take some of these Eastern teachers—
TS: Sure—
SH: Whether they’re Hindu or Buddhist, I mean they come from systems, if not whole cultures that are effectively theocracies, right, and they have these hierarchical notions of power, and they’ve got attitudes toward women that none of which really survive contact well with our current ethics.
And I think it would be wrong to say, and I’ve said this many times, that every time I bring a teacher onto Waking Up, I tend to ask them a question about ethics and how they view the indiscretions of various teachers. So this is something that if someone’s interested in this, basically every teacher I’ve interviewed over at Waking Up and there’s now been scores of them, I’ve gotten their opinion on this topic, but my opinion is that it really does matter to have worked out in advance what you think the important ethical guardrails are for a well-lived life. And so to decide in advance that lying is a bad thing and that you don’t want to do it unless in an emergency, right, that is some, maybe a stop on the continuum of violence, the Nazis show up at your door and you have Anne Frank in the attic, well, yeah, then you can lie and tell them she’s not there, or you can also shoot them, right? I mean, there are things you can do because you’re in extremis that you wouldn’t normally do.
But generally speaking, if you’ve worked out in advance that lying just needlessly destroys people’s lives and contaminates relationships and ruins reputations, et cetera, and you’re not going to do it, right, even when it’s tempting, even when it might be thought of as a white lie by most people, if you’ve done all of that work in advance, you are a very different person in all your moments of distraction and even perhaps in your moments of empty cognizance than you are if you hadn’t done any of that and you’re just making it up on the fly and just noticing how tempting it is or not to lie in a certain situation, and you haven’t figured out that you’re really wise to have a policy around lying, right?
And obviously, many of these gurus who came from the East who were by no means frauds, I mean, these are people who had real meditative insights and they really were certain kinds of spiritual athletes and they could produce insights and others, many of these guys and some gals clearly had no clear ethical commitment to honesty. And so they would lie in various circumstances. They’d lie to cover up the fact that they’re sleeping with some of their students or they’d lie to cover up the fact that they misappropriated funds. And the lying is, when you see how lying works as a gateway to all other kinds of misbehavior, whether it’s business fraud or infidelity in one’s relationships or whatever it is, I mean it’s, the moment you close the door to that, you have simplified your life radically, ethically.
So yeah, I think as much as I would like to say that it certainly would be nice if there was a really tight coupling between meditative insight and ethical probity, I just don’t see it. I don’t see it in myself. I certainly don’t see it in the lives of some of these great masters who-
TS: You don’t see it in yourself that the more time that you spend in, I’ll just say “consciousness,” to use that word, that it purifies you in a certain sense and that if you find yourself lying or acting unethically, it’s hard, things are gunked up when it comes to using that instantaneous breakthrough method, it’s not quite as available? You haven’t found that?
SH: Well, no. I mean, it cuts both ways. So for instance, so I arrived at my views about lying before I had any significant practice in the Dharma. So I think you can independently understand how disruptive lying is to your personal life and to our public lives and decide that you want to not do it.
But from the side of meditative insight, yes, you can notice that the impulse to lie invariably it’s coming from this contraction into self, right? Because when you look at what a lie is, it’s almost diagnostic of being taken in by the illusion of self. Because here you and I are talking, and if I’m tempted to lie to you, it’s based on the fact that there’s something that I know that I don’t want you to know. I want to misrepresent my beliefs about the world so as to change your beliefs in a desired way. And it’s very self and other, right? It’s just intrinsically self and other, and it’s based on some paranoia about not wanting certain things about me to be known, say, or I’m trying to manipulate you to gain something in the future, it’s just, it is a… The impulse to lie is almost by definition of this born of this contraction into self.
So let’s say now I’m a non-dual mindfulness yogi and I can notice this, I have no policy about lying, I’ve just been given non-dual mindfulness as a practice, but I haven’t really considered lying as an ethical problem, and now I’m just wandering through life, bouncing around in various relationships and noticing occasionally the impulse to lie, but I notice all kinds of other impulses, I’m noticing the fact that I want another scoop of chocolate ice cream, I want to watch television, there’s all kinds of things I want. And now I don’t want you to know something about me, or I want you to think something that isn’t true and I see that impulse arise. And yes, it would be possible to be mindful of that early enough so as to short circuit it, right?
But because there’s so much you’re not going to catch with your mindfulness for the longest time, even as an advanced practitioner of mindfulness, a lot of lying and a lot of chocolate ice cream, many things you might regret is going to get through. Whereas, if you just had a filter in advance, if you just knew, wait a minute, I’m allergic to chocolate ice cream, I can’t eat dairy, I’m never eating chocolate ice cream again, this just gives me a stomach ache, if you decided that in advance, well then there’s no war at the grocery store that you have to keep winning and maybe losing again and again and again for the rest of your life. And so it is with lying, if you’ve decided in advance that you don’t lie, it’s just not… if the temptation comes up, you have a real bulwark against it and it’s not vulnerable to the vagaries of your imperfect mindfulness.
And I would say also that it does cut both ways in that you could also be the kind of person who has various ethical lapses, you harm people with your lives, say, or your philandering, and it’s on the other side that your insight into emptiness kicks in. I mean, your regret over having harmed people is also just a story you’re telling yourself in this moment. It’s just a thought, you can let go of that. Why not just rapaciously gratify all of your desires and manipulate everybody and be a proper—
TS: Does that work? Does that work? That wouldn’t work for me. It wouldn’t work for me.
SH: Well, I mean it works because it is true to say it is just a thought. Now, I’m not saying it’s not a thought—
TS: I know, but there’s like, it hurts. It hurts. And there’s a—
SH: Yeah. But so does—
TS: I don’t know. It’s, I can feel—
SH: But there are many other thoughts that hurt. There might—
TS: Yeah, sure.
SH: I mean, it’s like the loss of a loved one—
TS: Sure.
SH: You think about how much you miss that person. At a certain point, you’re able to break the spell and notice that there’s space around all of this, space around any thought and any… the kindling of the negative emotion. I mean, and some of these emotions are bittersweet. I’m not saying all sadness is negative. I mean, you’d want to feel, it’s like, do you really want to be totally without sadness when someone you love dies? Is that your aspiration? Do you just want to feel like today is as good as any other day, that your spouse dies and 15 minutes later you’re just as happy as you’ve ever been? That’s not the goal I think, of anyone’s spiritual practice.
But yeah, I mean it’s true that, yeah, I mean I think that ultimately I think this is healthy, provided you’re actually a good person with a real ethical framework. I don’t think you want to be continually lacerated by your regrets or your sense of shame for having done something awful. I mean, you want to be able… To be able forgive yourself, much less anyone else in the world, you have to be able to let go of the past. So I mean, if you bring to mind something you’ve done in the past that you recognize to have been deeply unskillful, that you just feel like you can’t believe what an asshole you were or just how lacking in compassion you were, and you know that if you had a video of that moment in your life and you could replay it, it would just be appalling to see that you were that person.
All of us have moments like that in our lives. I mean not all of us are murderers, obviously, but all of us have moments that we really regret and are right to regret in the sense that we wouldn’t want to be that person in the future. We want to have learned from that moment of bad parenting or just jealousy—
TS: Sure—
SH: In a relationship or something. We want to learn from that and never do that again. And so that’s the utility of psychological regret and the psychological pain associated with it in my view, is that it’s a learning signal. You want to learn that lesson, but having learned it, you really do want to be able to move on. You want to be able to forgive yourself. You want to be able to have compassion for yourself, and you want to be able to cut through to the genuine emptiness that precedes all of that, wherein there’s really no place for anything to land, right?
I mean, it’s just, we’re all going to die. It’s all going to be over, right? It’s like, there’s no reason to be thinking about the thing that happened four years ago that you deeply regret. You have to let go of it, and to be a better person in this moment you have to let go of it, and you deserve to be that free and better person in this moment, whatever happened in the past.
So I’m just saying that, yeah, it’s conceivable to me that you could have someone like Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who was a brilliant teacher, I never studied with him, but he was a… judging from the books and the occasional tapes I’ve seen, he was a legitimately brilliant teacher, and I have no doubt he understood absolutely everything I’ve said in this conversation experientially very deeply and perhaps much more deeply than I’ve understood it, right? I mean, I don’t know. It’s hard to compare, but I have no reason to think he was a fraud. But he acted like a total madman ethically in various moments. And he was an alcoholic and he was a mess. And his students should be embarrassed by a lot of that and shouldn’t cover for it. And they should be honest about the implications of that.
And one of the implications is insight into emptiness at that level isn’t good enough to solve every problem we want to solve in life. I mean, it isn’t good enough, it doesn’t give you enough wisdom to form a human organization wherein people are reliably getting their interests served and being made happy. No, it’s a form to an organization where you have a successor who has AIDS, who’s sleeping with dozens of other students. And because the main guru knows nothing about biology, he thinks there’s no way he’s going to pass that AIDS along to his… he is not going to pass the HIV virus along to his students, right? Because no one in the group knows enough about that. It’s the ‘80s and everybody’s dumb, and they’ve got magical beliefs and he gives some innocent person AIDS, right? That’s embarrassing at a minimum. And there’s no one who’s in that lineage who should be hesitating to acknowledge the dysfunction of all of that.
And in my view, simply being able to liberate thoughts to just break your identification with thought isn’t enough because it doesn’t teach you about how the world works. It doesn’t teach you about virology, right? If you don’t know the mechanics of AIDS transmission before you recognize emptiness, you’re not going to know it after you recognize emptiness, right? It’s an additional piece of knowledge that you either have or you don’t.
And I think we want the best of both worlds. We want both individually and collectively, we want the ability to use knowledge to improve human life in all the ways that it can be improved and to cure diseases, to build economic systems that are not vulnerable to collapse, that don’t have perverse incentives that cause good people to behave like psychopaths. We want to improve our world, and there’s a lot that we have to know, and much of which we don’t yet know about how to do that. And spiritual insight into emptiness is just one piece. But it is true that I think it is personally and perhaps collectively, I mean it might be the most important piece. Personally it is definitely the most important piece that I know about, but there’s more to do. It’s a more complicated game to play than that.
TS: Sam, I have so enjoyed talking with you. Honestly, both preparing for this conversation and reading your book Waking Up and several articles, and watching other podcasts with you, and then having this conversation, several times I had the experience—I’ll just describe what it feels like—of something like getting bigger. I don’t know, Oprah calls it her “aha moments.” I don’t know if it’s exactly an aha moment, but it’s like, “Oh, now I see this thing that I didn’t previously see,” and it really matters and is actually a true delight and enriching.
SH: Nice. Nice.
TS: So I just want to thank you so much and also recommend to our Sounds True friends, to check out the Waking Up app and the Making Sense podcast and your books, and to thank you.
SH: Yeah, thank you. Great to meet you.
TS: Thanks for your boldness and bravery, and I hope we have more chances to interact in the months, years ahead.
SH: Yeah, until next time.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the aftershow
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