Questioning Sam Harris ｜ Sam Harris ｜ EP 224 (prt9D90BvFI)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=prt9D90BvFI

You need to value certain things in order to get any facts in hand in the first place. Any statement about facts relies on having first valued things like evidence and logical coherence. If you don’t value logic, there’s no logical argument you can give someone to say that they should value it. If someone doesn’t value evidence, there’s no evidence you could give them to say that they should value it. Epistemology sort of bites its own tail or picks itself up from its boot. That actually harkens back to the is-ought problem. Right there you said, and I’m not denying the validity of anything you’ve said so far, but right there you said that without agreeing on the validity of evidence, let’s say, there’s no agreement about what is. You’ve got a frame problem there, right? You have that value that you need to even determine what is. The question then is, well, where does that value come from? You can’t say, well, it comes from what is in some easy manner because you just said unless you have a value of a certain sort, you can’t derive what is. That’s partly why this is-ought problem just doesn’t seem to go away. Hello, everyone. I’m pleased today in a variety of ways to have as my guest, Dr. Sam Harris, who is undoubtedly to many of you watching or listening to this. Sam is a neuroscientist, philosopher and author of five New York Times bestsellers. His work covers a wide range of topics, neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, political polarization, rationality, but generally focuses on our developing understanding of ourselves and how our developing understanding of ourselves in the world is changing our sense of how we should live. His books include The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying and Waking Up. Sam hosts the popular Making Sense podcast. There’s also the creator of the Waking Up app, which we’re going to talk about a fair bit today, which offers a modern rational approach to the practice of meditation and an ongoing exploration of what it means to live a good life. He’s practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese and Western meditation teachers, both in the US and abroad. He holds a degree in philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA. Sam and I spoke twice a few years ago. It’s probably four years ago now on his podcast. We got bogged down a bit the first time trying to agree on a definition of truth, which in our defense is not necessarily the easiest thing to come to an agreement on, but our second discussion flowed more freely. Then we met twice in front of live audiences of about 3000 in Vancouver and soon after at Dublin and then at the O2 in London. Those were tremendously exciting events, I believe, for both of us and for everyone else involved, and perhaps even for the audiences where something approximating 9000 and 8000 people respectively listened to our discussions. And we haven’t spoken well for a long time, perhaps not since then even. So I’m very much looking forward to this. And Sam, first thing I’d really like to know is what do you make of those events in retrospect? And they attracted a very large crowd, certainly by our standards. And I’d like to know how you look back on that and what you think about that. Well, first, let me say I’m just very happy to see you and to be speaking with you again. It’s really it’s been I think we spoke once on the phone since those events, if I’m not mistaken. But, you know, it’s been the years pass quickly or all too slowly, depending on what’s going on, as you know. And, you know, I’ve heard about a lot of what you’ve gone through indirectly and what you’ve put out there publicly. And I just, you know, I was, you know, I was I was worried about you and I’m incredibly gratified to see you reemerge and and connect with your audience and and be back be back in the game because thanks, man. I value your voice a lot. Yeah. Well, it’s I’m pretty thrilled to be back and to be able to be talking to people again like this. So let’s hope it continues. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it was very interesting because, you know, as you know, and as as your your fans know, you really did kind of come out of nowhere like a, you know, on a rocket like trajectory. Right. So you were somebody I had never heard of. And then all of a sudden you were the most requested person for my from my audience to have on the podcast. And then we did that first podcast that you mentioned where we got bogged down on questions of epistemology and which, you know, I think I haven’t listened to it since, but I still think it was a useful conversation. And not got us going. Yeah. And many people found it very valuable. You know, it’s just to either to my advantage or your advantage. People found it valuable. They heard what they some heard what they wanted to hear in it and some some had their minds bent around as as was intended. But people, most people, many people certainly felt it was a kind of failed experiment in conversation. We should try it again. And then we had a much more amicable discussion on my podcast. And that planted the seed for these public events. And if memory serves, we had one event booked in Vancouver and you were still not quite the famous Jordan Peterson yet. And then in like in the 15 days it took us to actually get to that event. Your star had risen so quickly that we recognized that the promoter recognized that we had to book another event immediately after, you know, so the next night we had two back to back events in Vancouver. And then, yeah, those those subsequent events with you were really a lot of fun because we were disagreeing very stridently about fairly existential topics. And by the time we got to London and Dublin, we had these immense audiences that were were segmented in ways that I had never quite experienced. I’ve been in front of, you know, my home team audience and I’ve been in front of a hostile audience, but I’ve never been in front of an audience where, you know, fully 50 percent or 60 40. I mean, I don’t know what the split was at that point, but, you know, thousands of people were on one team and thousands of people were on another team for questions of God and faith and meaning. And, yeah, but everybody was on board for the discussion. You remember one thing that happened. This was in Vancouver. We were going to switch to a Q&A and we asked the audience essentially if they wanted the discussion to continue because we were in the middle of it or if they wanted to switch to the Q&A and was overwhelming support in the audience for the discussion to continue, which I thought was quite remarkable. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it was it was a lot of fun and there was just a tremendous amount of energy to have eight or nine thousand people show up for a intellectual discussion, really. I mean, it did have the character somewhat of a debate, but it was not framed as anything like a formal debate. And we were really just having a conversation and agreeing where we agreed and disagreeing where we disagreed. And it was anyway, I found it to be a lot of fun and it was ridiculously exciting. Yeah. And people people loved it. So, yeah, I’ve. Yes. And so what do you make of that? It’s like why in the world was what it was that we were talking about attractive to so many thousands of people? Well, you know, when you look at the full sweep of what we cover, I mean, in those particular conversations, we weren’t focusing on areas that we we agree about much more. I mean, you know, you and I, if you’re going to turn us loose on questions of. In a moral panic around identity politics and social justice hysteria, you and I will agree, I think probably 90 percent or more on many of those topics. And I don’t recall us touching any of that, but that but that was in the in the background. It was certainly it was certainly the wind in your sails, you know, making you more and more prominent at that point because you had hit those topics so hard. But, you know, the topics we were touching, questions of of, you know, what is reality and how we should live within it? Really, you know, the fundamental questions of of what it means to live a good life. What are the requisites for living a good life? How should we think about our place in the universe so as to have the best chance of living a good life? These are the most important questions anyone ever asks, provided they have sufficient freedom to even worry about such things. Right. I mean, if the if the wolf is at the door or in the room, well, then people really, for the most part, don’t have the luxury of of worrying about whether they’re as ethical or as honest or as profoundly engaged with the the present moment as they might be. As they might be. But once you get to something like, you know, first world concerns where you have enough material abundance, where you’re, you know, survival is not a question and when political stability is sufficient, that you’re not continually worried that, you know, your neighbors are going to murder you. Then you’re then it really. I mean, then then we, you know, when you when you wake up at three in the morning and can’t get back to sleep, you’re thinking about what what does this all mean and what’s you know, what is a good life? One of the things that we did agree on, I think that sort of provided a container for the discussions in total was that there was potentially such a thing as the good life, that that’s just not some, you know, epiphenomenal abstraction or something like that, but something central. And to some degree, I think we disagreed about. Where the information for deriving what might constitute the good life comes from, but it isn’t even clear to me exactly where those differences lie. And that was part of, I suppose, the fun of the discussion and something that I also hope to continue today, because I’ve seen since then, it seems to me that you’ve turned your attention more and more, perhaps not more and more, but you certainly continued your route into investigation of what constitutes the good life and and also your attempts to bring what you’ve learned to perhaps an increasingly wide audience using the technology that you’re using now. This app that you have, which is the waking up app, my wife has subscribed to that for the last year and a half. And I joked with you earlier that she probably spent more time with you than she has with me in the last year and a half. So that’s quite, quite comical. But she finds it’s quite useful. And I took a good look at it today. How does tell me about that app and why you’re doing that? Are you doing that instead of writing a book or is it another book? And why are you doing that? Well, I seem to be doing everything instead of writing a book. The writing a book is has become an opportunity cost that I can’t justify at the moment, but no doubt I will write another book at some point. But yeah, between my podcast and app, that’s really those are the two channels where I am putting out my ideas at this point. So why did you switch to that? Well, I looked at the app and one of the things you’re doing is you’ve broken down lectures in some sense into like 10 minute chunks that are focused on different topics, a whole variety of topics. I’ve got the app right here and assuming my phone. So there’s groups of lectures, fundamentals, mind and emotion, the illusory self, mysteries and paradoxes and some of the topics, for example, the illusory self, self and other alone with others looking in the mirror, the art of doing nothing, mysteries and paradoxes. What is real consciousness? The mystery of being in some ways, it looks like a book, right? It’s got chapters, it’s got sub chapters, but why, why this, why this technology? And how is it performed for you in comparison to a book? Well, so I did write the book version of this content or certainly most of this content, so I have a book waking up and it touches, you know, it is my attempt to ground so-called spiritual experience, you know, experiences like self transcendence and unconditional love and the kinds of things people experience on, you know, various psychedelics, you know, this is all of increasing interest to people now. I wanted to ground all of that in what I consider to be a rational, empirical understanding of the world, right? I didn’t want to believe anything on insufficient evidence so as to prop up the importance of these experiences because they don’t, they don’t actually need to be propped up by, by, by, you know, in my view, faith or any unjustified claim to knowledge. And they do, you know, at very interesting points, deliver their own kind of knowledge about the nature of the mind. I mean, there are things you can recognize directly in your experience that puts your understanding of your own subjectivity in closer register with what we understand about the brain, right? Now, not everything is, can be, can be cashed out experientially, but many things can. And can I, can I ask you one question? Sure. Well, I, okay. So that’s, there’s a bunch of that, that I agree with deeply. And one of the things I’ve tried to do to the degree that it was possible when talking about, let’s say matters that could be religious, I’ve tried to stay out of the religious territory as much as possible because it seems to me counterproductive to make an appeal to faith. Would you can make an appeal to, what would you do it? Not just to experience it’s deeper than that to something like the combination of experience and science. So let me run something by you as an example and see what you think of this. Cause one of the things that we really. Spared about, I suppose, or discussed was the, the is ought conundrum, right? Right. We, we agree that you have to have oughts because you have to act and that’s the landscape of value, but we ran into some trouble, I think, trying to make our viewpoints about where those oughts might be derived from. You seem to be more convinced than me, perhaps that the step from is to ought was simpler and I was more convinced that it was more complicated and there were problems that still remained there. I’ll let you respond to that, but I wanted to talk about this deeper experience. So I was standing with my wife the other day on the dock of this cottage we have up North and it’s very dark up here. And so when you look up, you can see the night sky well enough to see the Milky way and actually to see galaxies, if you use the corner of your eye. And, and so, and one of the things that’s associated with that is an experience of awe and it’s not surprising because there you are confronting what’s essentially infinite as far as you’re concerned as much as it might be for us. And I thought a lot about the experience of awe. One of the things, and it’s also produced by music quite regularly. One of the things that happens when you experience awe is that a vestigial pile, erection, uh, mechanism kicks in. And that’s the mechanism that makes prey animals puff up. You see this with cats. They’re quite funny when they do this, they puff up so they look bigger in, in, in this, when they catch sight of a threatening predator. And so they perhaps subjectively experiencing experience the more terror stricken end of awe, but that awe is very, very deep. It’s not, it’s not a rational response. It’s way underneath rationale and it’s an instinctual response. And it seems to me as well that it’s associated very tightly with our instinct to imitate and it’s strange to think that you could look at the night sky and that could catalyze a, in an instinct to imitate, but we’re very, we’re very good at using abstraction as creatures and it’s not exactly obvious what we can imitate and what we can’t. So I think that’s an example of this idea that you’re putting forward that the domain of religious experience, let’s say our spiritual experience has a, a biological underpinning, a deep biological underpinning. And part of my question is, well, what’s the, what are the implications of that exactly if that, if that happens to be the case? So first, I’d like to know if you agree about that discussion about awe and the is an odd thing and then anything else you’d like to add, I’d like to hear. Yeah, we’ve opened many doors there. That’s a, I see a 10 hour conversation, but it treated in just those topics. But, um, well, to start with the is ought bit, you’re in very good company. Most people in science and philosophy, as you know, believe there really is a, a, a disjunction between is and ought and to follow Hume’s really cast aside remarks, I mean, he didn’t go into it deeply, but, but at one point, uh, he wrote that, uh, you can’t derive an ought from an is, right? There’s no description of the way the world is. They can tell you how it ought to be. So, um, uh, and he was, he was decrying the fact that so many scholars and then in general, so many theologians in his time would move smoothly from is to ought without acknowledging that they had, had committed a logical error. But I do think there’s a trick of language lurking at the bottom of this is an odd talk that is misleading. And, um, and it’s, it’s difficult to spot and, you know, I believe I’ve spotted it and, and, but I, I, you know, the people who don’t agree with me, don’t agree with me, I mean, their intuitions don’t pass through, you know, the point where I’m, I’m trying to shove them. Um, and, you know, it’s somewhat analogous to, um, you know, the philosopher Wittgenstein made a point when he was criticizing Freud, he was criticizing Freud’s notion of the unconscious. He didn’t, he thought this reification of the unconscious was, was fallacious. And I, you know, we can leave that aside. I don’t, you know, that’s, uh, I’m not sure I agree with him there, but the, the point he was making about the power of language was interesting. He said, imagine if instead of saying, uh, I saw a nobody in the room, we said, I saw Mr. Nobody in the room. Imagine a language that forced us to say, I saw Mr. Nobody, right? Just imagine what confusion would be born of that convention of language. That’s something he said in his, I think it was in the blue book. And there are many places in our thinking about the world where language plays a similarly confusing role where we have reified something, which is not. Probably happens with free will. Yeah. No. So I think it’s a confused, it’s confused us about free will. It’s confused us about, about death, for instance. I mean, I think what, you know, if you’re an atheist who doesn’t believe that anything happens after you die, right? If you think, uh, there’s, there’s no rebirth, you know, there’s no reincarnation and that Eastern picture of karma and rebirth is probably not true. And you think there’s no heaven or hell. And if you really think you get something like a dial tone when you die, well, many people are left expecting some kind of oblivion, some kind of positive nothingness, some, some, some permanent loss of experience where, and so this notion of, of, of, of oblivion, um, is a kind of reification. Uh, but if you, if you think about it more clearly, that’s precisely the kind of thing you would not, I mean, if, if it’s simply the end of experience, well, then you’re not going to be experiencing the end of experience, right? This is not, you didn’t, you didn’t experience an absence before you were born. Right. Well, the idea that you would experience is implicit in the way the question is framed, right? Right. So there’s nothing you’re going to suffer. I mean, this is something that Epicurus pointed out, um, uh, through Lucretius that, you know, death is nothing for us, you know, where we are, death is not, and where death is, we are not, right? Like there’s just, there’s non-overlapping sets of facts, whatever those facts are. If in fact, death is the end of experience. So, which is to say there’s nothing to worry about really, if, uh, if death is, is just the end of anything. Um, and so how do you think that relates to the is, is odd problem? So to come back to, to is and odd, I just think really what we have, I mean, forget about morality, forget about questions of good and evil, forget about, uh, any value judgment. What I, and try to return your mind to something like the primal circumstance of consciousness, right? I mean, just, just imagine waking up from, you know, a 100 year sleep and you’ve forgotten everything about yourself and now you’re just a mind in a world. Um, in some sense, we’re all in, we’re all potentially in that position in every moment in our lives, you know, just seeing creation of fresh, right? Seeing this moment of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking for, you know, as though for the first time, you know, clearly, do you know that, have you ever heard of the neurological case? I think it was a man who had bilateral hippocampal damage and he was in the psychiatric hospital and he woke up like that every second. Yeah. His wife would, his wife would come in the room and he’d say, it’s as if, it’s as if I’m seeing you for the first time. He lost that. He lost the imposition of memory on his perception. And so every perception was fresh and new. Yeah. Well, so, and I’m not recommending brain damage to anyone as a way of freshening up the experience, but there’s a, there’s a non neurologically compromised way of, of grasping this intuition, which is it just in this moment, you know, experience really is potentially totally fresh and totally new. And, but for the fact there’s this, there’s this ever present layer of our thinking about it, our remember remembering what just happened, our expecting the next thing that’s going to happen. It’s really the conversation we’re having with ourselves in each moment. And meditation is a way of breaking that spell and actually being vividly aware of the present moment in a way that frees you from this automaticity of just a view and everything through your, through your concepts and your discursiveness. That’s a neurologically justifiable viewpoint too, because it looks like the hippocampal map that more or less keeps track of, in some sense, our memories, and then also of our conditional positioning in the world is likely either it’s inhibiting that more primal perception, although it’s doing it in a very useful manner, generally speaking, because it keeps us oriented enough in the moment so that we focus on minute, the minute details that might be necessary to our survival. But it’s, it’s conceivable that it’s simultaneously blinding to blinding us to a broader and deeper reality that in some sense is deeply nourishing in the face of suffering. Yeah, yeah. And and what’s more the the mechanism that is tiling over reality with concepts in every moment and keeping us thinking and perseverating about our experience rather than recognizing that we’re identical to our experience. Let’s table this part of the discussion for a second. This would go under the question of what is the self? You know, what do we mean by self and what might self transcendence be? But this whole mechanism is productive of most, if not all of our psychological suffering, right? Like there’s just, you know, all of our anxiety and depression and fear and regret and shame and and an inability to love even the people we ostensibly love, you know, in our lives, you know, the contraction into self that is so toxic so much of the time, you know, all of our deferring our happiness to some future time where we’ve met all of these goals that that that raise our status in comparison with, you know, everyone else we’re comparing ourselves to. That whole stratum of of being a person is a confection of endlessly thinking about ourselves, about our past and our future and even our present. And it’s possible to punch through that, whether it’s through, you know, using psychedelics or practicing meditation or just having just a collision with the present moment that’s engineered by something, you know, you’re someone close to you dies or say, you know, something, something changes. Music can do that. Yeah, it can do that. And dance can do that. Or, you know, in certain cases, the, you know, the awe you describe looking at looking up at the Milky Way, right? I mean, that can do that for people. OK, so let me let me. But I just I just didn’t answer. I didn’t answer your question. The this. This notion that there’s there’s this separation between facts and values, right, doesn’t doesn’t run through when you when you think of what this primal circumstance is like, where you have to figure out how you when you have to make sense of the world, you have to you have to try to understand what is going on in the world. And you have to most importantly, you have to figure out what to do next. Right. So I view so you can forget about morality, forget about science, forget about anything for the moment and just recognize that the world is such that we’re confronted with a ever present navigation problem. We have this the possibility of navigating both personally and collectively to places in the space of all possible experience that are just manifestly terrible. You know, and the worst place I call the worst possible misery for everyone. Right. So it is possible to imagine a universe where every conscious system suffers as much as it possibly can for as long as it can. You know, some some version of the perfect hell. Right. And then there’s then it’s possible to recognize that whatever you want to call it, whether you want to use words like good and evil or right and wrong or not. Every other place on the what I call the moral landscape is better than the worst possible misery for everyone. I agree with that completely. That that’s why I studied atrocity for so long, because I figured if I could find out what the worst thing was, that would be a pointer to the best thing, because, you know, the worst thing, then the opposite of that is the best thing, whatever that is. That doesn’t mean you have to propositionalize it. It’s not even that easy to do. And there may be many opposites of that. It may not just be one best possible place on the landscape. There could be many peaks and valleys on the moral landscape, and there could be peaks that are not equivalent in anything but the fact that they are equally distant from the worst possible misery for everyone. Right. So there could be. So I’m not you know, this can sound like moral relativism, but it’s not. It’s it’s it’s an objective picture of morality. I think it does. But it’s just to say that there are there may be there may be very different ways of living where given the given the right kind of minds involved, you could be happy in very strange ways and in ways that would be counterintuitive for apes like ourselves. But nonetheless, they could be very far from the worst possible misery for everyone. So in any case, I call this so whatever you want to call navigating in this space, moving away from just unendurable, pointless misery right toward beauty and creativity and joy and love and all of the good stuff we recognize. And again, there’s there’s there’s no we haven’t seen the horizon of this. We have no idea how beautiful life could be for for minds like our own or minds, you know, significantly more sensitive and creative and intelligent than our own. There’s no vision of heaven as a place that was perfect, where everyone that was in it was striving to make it better. Right, right. Yeah. So there’s there’s some that we don’t know how good things can get. And we don’t know how bad things can get. But we know they can get quite terrible from where our current vantage point and we know they can get quite wonderful from our current vantage point. And this is where the distance between facts and values collapses for me. There are right. Let me ask you a question. Let me just land this final sentence. There are there are right and wrong answers with respect to how to navigate in this space. Right. There there is it is and they’re right and wrong whether we’ve discovered them or not. Right. We could all be wrong about the thing we should do next. So as to be as happy as possible. You know, we could be we could think we’re doing something very wise and compassionate and useful. And actually, we’re, you know, slowly poisoning ourselves with some, you know, toxin that we haven’t identified. Right. So there are things so it is truly possible to not know what you don’t know. It’s truly possible to not know what you’re missing. Right. For there to be some happier place on the landscape that you could get to if only you knew to try to get to it. But you’re not trying to get to it because you’re satisfied, you know, drinking 12 beers a night and, you know, cheating on your wife or whatever it is. You can have a whole civilization that is unaware of. That’s a local peak. Yeah, exactly. Great one. It’s a local peak, but yes, not as good as it might be. So there are there are two ways to see that this in my view, that this this disconnection between facts and values collapses. First, you need this you need to value certain things in order to get any facts in hand in the first place. Any statement about facts relies on having first valued things like evidence and logical coherence. Right. If you’re if you don’t value logic, there’s no logical argument you can give someone to say that they should value it. If someone doesn’t value evidence, there’s no evidence you could give them to say that they should value it. So that so it you know, epistemology sort of bites its own tail or picks itself up from its boot. Right. Well, that actually that actually hearkens back to the is ought problem, right? Because right there you said and I’m not denying the validity of anything you’ve said so far, but right there you said that without agreeing on the validity of evidence, let’s say, there’s no agreement about what is and there we’ve got a frame problem there, right? We have that value that you need to even determine what is well, the question then is, well, where does that value come from? And you can’t say, well, it comes from what is in some easy manner, because you just said, unless you have a value of a certain sort, you can’t derive what is and that’s partly why this audience is ought problem just doesn’t seem to go away. Yeah, but it’s so but it goes away because it goes away the moment you recognize there is in principle always a mystery at our backs. You know, this is true experientially. I mean, I would say this true experientially with respect to the nature of consciousness, but it’s true conceptually with respect to even those fields that pretend to be most directly in contact with the nature of reality. And so even physics, you know, when you’re talking about the most rudimentary laws of physics, right, there is still there has to be a first brute fact or a or a brute axiom that you accept that doesn’t that need not prove itself, right? Is this self justifying epistemology? Yes. Well, that exactly. Yes, I believe that. Well, I think that that’s why there is an emphasis on faith in some principle in so many religious traditions is that there is a starting place there and you’re you’re trying to flesh out where that is, at least to some degree. So let let me ask you a couple of that mentioned one thing and then ask you a couple more things. So this is ought distinction is even more peculiar when you look deep into the neuroscience of perception. Okay, so one of the most influential books I ever read was an ecological approach to visual perception. And it’s a classic text on perception and a very sophisticated one. And I don’t think it has no pretensions to mysticism of any sort. And so that’s kind of interesting given the conclusion and the conclusion of the author is that what we see aren’t facts or objects. We see meanings. So for example, a six month old who crawls towards a visual cliff, which is a blade of glass stretched over or placed over a falling off places, the six month old will stop. He won’t crawl seven months. I don’t remember the exact age. You won’t crawl across that piece of glass, right? He doesn’t see cliff and infer falling off place. He sees falling off place. And there’s a condition called neglect, which is characteristic of certain people have prefrontal lobe damage called sorry, it’s not neglect. It’s called utilization behavior. Yeah. And these people lose the ability not to act in the presence of a meaningful object. So if they walk down the hall and the door is open, they will go through the door. If you put a cup in front of them, they cannot stop but pick it up because they don’t see cup and infer drinking. They see drinking object directly. And so even that is a distinction is is deceptive in a very fundamental sense because it’s predicated on the idea that what we see are meaningless objects and that we lay an overlay of meaning on top of that. And it’s not by no means obvious at all that that’s how we see. Yeah. And that’s part of the reason why it’s been so difficult to make machines that can see and act in the real world, because the object world is not simple. And that value structure that you’re describing that over that that value structure, right, that is embedded in all of our perceptions in ways that we are only beginning to understand scientifically. Yeah, there’s so many ways in which our you know, what’s called folk folk psychological sense of what our minds do is is just completely broken. Right. And we have it we have a sense of of the tools we’re using to do anything, you know, that would beliefs, desires, perceptions, expectations, the movement of attention, right. And our sense of what all of this is, from the first person side, has definitely broken apart in many respects, as we’ve studied these things neuroscientifically from and psychologically from the third person side. And understanding ourselves, understanding the world and our place within it, and what’s possible is inevitably a marriage of those two sides. I mean, you can’t you can’t fully banish first person experience, because they’re most of what we we know about ourselves has a cash value in terms of the experiential side. I mean, there’s, you know, to take the greatest case, there’s simply no evidence of consciousness anywhere in the universe, but for the fact that we know it to to exist in ourselves from the first person side. I mean, you can’t look at a brain, even a living one, and have and form any intuition that it’s a locus of consciousness. It’s only by correlating changes in the experience of living people with, you know, tools of neuro imaging in this case, or things like EEG, where we say, OK, well, when the brain’s doing that, there’s something that it’s like to experience those changes, right. And that and and we pretend rather often to take the third person science side off the gold standard of first person experience and say, OK, that’s really the mind may be an illusion, maybe even consciousness is an illusion. What we know is happening is that our brains that are processing information and we’ve got things like synapses and and neuromodulators and neurotransmitters. And that’s the real stuff, right? That’s the reality. This mind part is is some kind of. Right. That’s a definition. It’s not an observation. It’s just a tissue of confusion. Reality. Right. That’s a big problem. Yeah, there’s no you can’t you can’t banish the the the side, which is, in fact, cashing out so many of your claims about the nature of, in this case, the brain. And but that’s not to say that we can’t be deeply mistaken from the first person side about what our minds are doing. I mean, so, you know, I’m, you know, as you as we’ve indicated here already, I’m an enormous fan of meditation. I think it’s I think it’s indispensable for understanding certain things about the nature of the mind. But you can’t even tell that you have a brain by meditating. Right. Much less, you know, what it’s doing. So it’s like, is that there are things that you there with some major blind spots in first person experience, no matter how you train experience. But you can notice, for instance, that the sense of self, the sense that you’re a subject interior to your experience, you’re kind of a locus of a consciousness that is appropriate in experience. That is that is an illusion or at best a convention, right? A kind of construction that you can cease to construct. And so much of it. So why why do you why do you believe that that’s so useful? I know something core here. Yeah, no, it’s a great question. I want to make I want to make one observation before we go back to her. So, well, one of the things I learned when I was studying ancient Egyptian mythology was that the Egyptians worshipped Horus, that’s the eye. And we may have talked about this before, but they weren’t worshipping rationality. They weren’t worshipping that monkey mind. They were worshipping attention itself. And they regarded attention as the process that revitalized dead totalitarianism because they had a God for that. That was Osiris. And so there’s something. And when the Egyptians were contemplating what constituted proper political sovereignty, they regarded the union of Osiris and Horus as the emblem of proper sovereignty. And that was the Osiris that was rescued from his totalitarian state by his union with Horus. So it’s like the conceptual world, which tends to ossify like, well, like Egypt in the Exodus book and the attention process, which focuses perhaps on what’s outside of that of totalitarian certainty and therefore continues to update it. And that’s not rationality. And I think it’s pointing to something that’s similar to what you’re fascinated by with your concentration on it. I think it’s on attention per se. It’s not rationality. It’s certainly not. It’s not the contents of thought. It’s something more like direct apprehension. And, you know, in clinical in clinical practice, Rogers, Carl Rogers, particularly taking a bit of a leaf from Freud. But he said that if you attend to your clients, which meant listen to them, but it meant attend, it didn’t mean engage them in rational dialogue. It meant more like, listen, they will transform psychologically as a matter of course. Right. Yeah, so I use attention as slightly different way or a more specific way and differentiated from something like consciousness or awareness itself. So like so and this is I think this is I mean, I’m sure there are different ways of using it, but one tends to meet this definition now in in cognitive science and neuroscience where. It’s a narrowing of the field of awareness, but there’s still a field or there’s or it’s like a spotlight within it, within a larger field. So, for instance, I’m looking at you on on Zoom now and I can look at it. I can look at, you know, one of your eyes. Right. I can specifically look at that eye and I can focus on that. But there are many other things that I within my visual field that I am not focusing on, but which are nevertheless there. And one of them could suddenly capture my, quote, attention. Right. So I’m looking at your eye. I’m doing my best to look at your eye to the exclusion of everything else. But if, you know, if a mouse ran across my desk, all of a sudden that would have 100 percent of my attention. And that’s that shift is the shift of the spotlight. That that’s the that’s the attentional mechanism that is happening within this larger context of what I would call consciousness or awareness, because it’s, you know. So you’re using attention as as the spotlight, like, yeah, like the fovea. Right. Exactly. So it’s the kind of the cognitive fovea where. So that’s where consciousness is most intense. Right. Because those neurons are each neuron in the fovea is connected to 10,000 neurons in the primary visual cortex. So it’s it’s tremendously dense cortically. And then so you could think of maybe we could distinguish these two concepts this way. So at in the center of your vision at the fovea, it’s extraordinarily high resolution consciousness, which we call attention. And then as you move out from the fovea to the periphery, your your consciousness becomes lower and lower resolution until out here. If you’re speaking visually, you can’t even really count the number of fingers that you see. You can see the hands only if they move. And out here, it’s black and white. And out here, it’s gone. Yeah. High resolution foveal focus. And you can move your eyes to put that high resolution, high neurological vision to work. Yeah, I would I would use the terminology a little differently here, though, because I wouldn’t say that consciousness is diminishing at the edges. I would say that visual perception is so consciousness is just the fact that anything is being known. Right. So you can be conscious, for instance, of a very blurry vision. Right. Or you can be conscious that you’re blind, that you can’t see anything. Right. But like if you just close your eyes now, even your visual consciousness is just as present. It’s just you’re you’re just aware of this, the darkness behind your eyelids. Right. And it’s not even all that dark. There’s it’s scintillating with various colors. And right. So OK. So we could say that you’ve got that high resolution attention in the middle. Then it gets lower resolution out to here where you can’t see. And then that’s all contained within a broader attentional field. Right. Yes. And I would call that the broadest possible field, just consciousness. OK. OK. Fine. So OK, so now we know exactly what we mean by our terms. And so and so what I would what I would say to your question, which I think is a very important question, what’s the point of of examining the self, you know, much less transcending it? There are several points. I mean, the main one is that it is the the string upon which all of our suffering is is strung. I mean, it’s just it is just it is when you feel as miserable as you can feel, that sense of being at the center of this torment and like what what direction will you find relief? Right. I mean, this is this is just this is you’ve got the cacophony of unpleasant experience and then you’ve got this place in the middle of it or apparent place in the middle of it from which you’re trying to resist this experience, right, or figure it trying to figure out how to change it. Right. So let’s say you have a terrible pain, you know, somewhere in your body, you know, there’s the pain. There’s a strong stimulus of unpleasant sensation, you know, the burning and and stabbing and twisting feeling. And then there’s this reaction to it from apparently some point outside the pain, very likely, you know, for most people up in the head. I mean, most people feel like they’re a subject in their heads that is not not truly coincident with the rest of their body. They don’t feel most people for the most part don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies and these bodies can misbehave in various ways. And again, so you have a terrible pain. The pain is down there. Let’s say it’s in your knee. You’re up here now, a hostage being tortured by the misbehavior of the rest of your body. Right. And you’re resisting. You’re trying to you’re trying to find some way of resisting these sensations. And so it is with emotional distress or unpleasant thoughts, right? You know, you can have thoughts that terrorize you. And all of it seems to suggest, I mean, this is, you know, this is the extreme case of of stark unhappiness. But even in the best of times, right, even when things are going really well and everything experience is very smooth and we’re getting what we want. And, you know, we’re we, you know, our favorite treats are just an arm’s length away. And we’re filling our mouths with with gumdrops or whatever it is. We’re we’re gratifying this thing at the center of our experience. And it can never be finally gratified because experience itself is impermanent. It’s just, you know, it’s just you get to the thing you want and you gorge yourself on it. And then not only a new thing, you want a new thing. You know, then you need a drink of water because this lingering taste in your mouth of chocolate mousse or whatever it is. It’s too cloying and too much. And you got to wash that out so that you just you wouldn’t want to stay in that state, even if you could. And there’s some there’s there’s kind of this rolling dissatisfaction, even insatisfaction that we all encounter, even in the best of times. Even when you literally can get anything, more or less anything you want. And and yet we know at any moment it can be subverted by something terrible happening. You know, at any moment, you can suddenly feel like you’re you might be having a heart attack. Right. And then that becomes the thing that the this sense of me in the middle of everything collapses upon. And and it is it makes life. I mean, this this again, the sense of of of being this vulnerable center. Right. It makes life this kind of long emergency that can be pacified by you know, increasingly strenuous efforts to control experience. Right. We have to control this thing because at any moment we’re constantly if you just look at any moment, we might die. Yeah. We’re avoiding death. You know, but even you know, even for those of us who don’t think about death very often, and there are those people, we’re constantly modifying our experience. So as to avoid discomfort, whether it’s social or physical, social discomfort or physical discomfort, or just every every correction in our body. I mean, if you if you just try to sit still for an hour, you’ll notice that all of the micro adjustments of in posture that you’re now no longer making are made because you really don’t have to wait long before you feel miserable. I mean, your body, the amount of pain you can get just sitting in the most comfortable chair you can find in your home and just resolving not to move is quite extraordinary. It’s just, you know, it’s just there’s no position that’s comfortable enough that it will be comfortable an hour from now. OK, so when you when you rise out of that into this meditative state, like what what’s your experience and what has that done for you personally and ethically? OK, so so the starting point, which I’ve just dimly sketched out of being a subject in the head, right? I mean, this is something that I will be familiar to 99 percent of our audience or 99.999 percent of our audience. People feel that they are they don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. And now, you know, they might be told, OK, you might want to look into this practice of meditation. You might want to just understand yourself a little better here. Start with this practice. You can close your eyes and pay attention to the feeling of breathing, you know, the sensation of breathing in the in the in the rising, falling of their chest or the air passing in their nostrils. And every time you get lost in thought, just come back to the raw sensation of breathing. It’s a very basic exercise of, you know, what’s called mindfulness. And the moment you try to try to do that, you begin to discover or, you know, some moments down the line, you discover that it’s very hard to do that. You’re that your default state is to get distracted by a conversation you’re having with yourself and to forget all about this project of paying attention to the present moment. And it could be it doesn’t matter what it is, but, you know, the breath in this case. And and so it is, in fact, true to say that for most people, I mean, literally ninety nine point nine percent of our audience, they couldn’t pay attention to the breath for a full minute, say, even if their lives depended on it. Right. It’s just it’s simply not in the cards. It’s not it’s, you know, the fate of the world could depend on it. And someone who’s not really fairly well trained in this just couldn’t do it. And so that’s interesting. Right. What’s interesting is that despite your best efforts, you get carried away by thought helplessly moment after moment. Now, being able to break that spell, being able to see thought as thought, eventually, once you get some degree of mindfulness in hand, you no longer confine your attention to the breath or any other arbitrary object. You begin to open it up to everything you can possibly experience. So it’s just, you know, sights and sounds and sensations and emotions and and thoughts themselves can become objects of mindfulness. But when you can. But this is where this is the kind of crucial, the crucial, you know, kind of almost binary difference, which which produces an immense amount of psychological benefit. The moment you can really notice thoughts themselves as appearances in consciousness rather than what you are in each moment, because what happens is in the default case, the thoughts kind of creep up from behind us. In some sense, they kind of come out of nowhere and that just feels like me. Right. So I’m you know, I’m trying to get a reflex of identification. Well, you wouldn’t act the damn things out if they didn’t feel like you. You know, and so they have to have that impulse to action in them that that’s part of felt identity. Right. So you’re saying that you’re saying, and this is part of I suppose part of the Buddhist tradition, particularly, although not only that being the puppet of those thoughts is part of what prolongs suffering, at least under some circuits, especially being the puppet of them. Yes. Yeah. OK. Yeah. And so and so this is so. And so this is so but the people listening to us now can feel this. So, you know, we’re talking and people are trying to understand the thread of this conversation. But it’s that they have a voice in their head that’s competing with this. Right. They know they’re trying to listen to us, but they’re also thinking. Right. And I think they might think, well, what the hell is he talking about? Right. Like there’s just some some intrusive thought comes in or like, oh, no, wait a minute, he didn’t answer the question. That thought that that feels if you’re identified with it, if you don’t see it as mere language appearing in consciousness or mere imagery, right, it feels like me. It’s like that is the self that is. It feels like what I believe. Yeah, that’s just that. There’s no space around interesting. Yeah. Well, one of the things you do in clinical work all the time, especially in the cognitive behavioral field, is you help people identify those thoughts in some sense as as objects that to no longer identify with them and say, you know, just because you think that it’s not necessarily true, it’s not necessarily you. And it’s not necessarily helpful. Right. Now we can check and see if any of those three, you know, propositions were true. Maybe it is you. Maybe you do believe it. Maybe it is useful. But we’re going to start by hypothesizing that some of these automatic thoughts are actually what’s driving your misery. And I really also see that as a tremendous danger of totalitarian ideologies, because they’re thought systems that are almost entirely foreign in some sense to the individual person that invade that cognitive space that you’re describing and then manifest themselves as unquestioning identity. And if they’re blinding the person to some underlying reality, that’s actually revivifying and nourishing and an antidote to suffering. Then they’re a tremendous block to exactly that process. Yeah, yeah. So there are two levels at which we can address this problem of thought and its its connection to suffering. And one is at the level of thought itself. So you can you can replace bad thoughts with better thoughts. And you can you can get some you can triangulate on your your tendency to have one kind of conversation with yourself and engineer a better conversation with yourself. Right. And that’s, you know, yes, incognito behavioral therapy like a six year old, for example, and start thinking like a 30 year old. Right. Right. And what’s more, a 30 year old that actually has good intentions for you, right? Like you could a friend. Yes. Right. Right. Exactly. Your friend. Yeah. Yeah. A loved one, even. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Can you imagine that? So imagine that. So that’s that’s a that’s a totally legitimate way to to climb out of of the great hole of suffering that people find themselves in. But there’s a there’s a more fundamental and I’m not I’m not saying what, you know, what I’m what I’m recommending in terms of meditation and mindfulness here is more fundamental, but it is not. It’s completely compatible with that, you know, more conceptual discursive layer. Right. And some things I would argue some things are best addressed on the discursive layer and some things are better addressed on the on the the more fundamental layer. Well, you know, when you’re sitting meditating, first of all, you’re sitting. And so it’s perfectly reasonable to adopt a mode of thought that’s healthful and productive in relationship to the fact that you’re sitting. You know, those more discursive propositional thoughts that we’ve been describing, they’re they’re higher resolution in some sense, and they’re more practically implementable. And so there’s going you want to get that in order. But that doesn’t mean that there that this phenomenon that you’re describing, that’s outside the entire discursive structure doesn’t exist. And it’s probably also the place we go, at least to some degree, when we go to sleep and we dream and get revivified. It’s outside that discursive landscape. And that’s necessary for physiological rejuvenation. Yeah. Well, dreams are very interesting because I think they are necessary. And we know a lot about the necessity of of REM sleep for health. And so there’s no question that dreams are doing good things for us. But they also are an experience of stark psychosis. You know, I mean, they are they are a condition. Unless you’re unless we’re talking about lucid dreaming. This is a circumstance where you really have no idea what’s going on. I mean, you are you are in reality asleep in your bed. And yet you have transitioned into another experience, which where the laws of nature are violated, you’re talking to dead people. You’re you know, the sky is the limit. Right. And you’re not even surprised. You’re doing so little reality testing. You’re not even surprised about these changes. You have so little purchase on who you were just 15 minutes ago when you went to sleep that it’s so that it does mean it does mean to some degree at that point, though, that you have suspended your unthinking identification with your daytime propositional thought. Yeah. But in the normal case, you’re identified with your dream body and your dream persona and whoever you whoever you’ve become. I mean, you’re you’re being terrorized in a in a in a more malleable. Right. The problem is still there. Yeah. It’s just it’s it’s it’s it’s more random and less logically coherent. There’s something there about exploration and change of categories themselves that’s going on. But I can see your point about it still being well, actually. And more to the point, there’s actually a very close connection between what happens with ordinary thought and dreaming. So, for instance, I mean, ordinary thinking is it to me in my view, or ordinary identification with thought, I’m not. I don’t mean to demonize thought per se because we need thoughts. And the goal of meditation is not to get rid of thoughts, is to be able to recognize them as as what they are and to recognize the process of thinking and to break this this this pseudo identification with it. But the identification with thought is very much analogous to dreaming and not knowing that you’re dreaming. And the switch from a normal dream to a lucid dream is analogous to to the kind of waking up in the middle of life that I’m I’m advocating here, where you can actually just recognize thoughts as thoughts. And there’s something that the way in which. Thoughts steal over us, where it’s like you’re trying to pay attention to something and then all of a sudden, you’re you’re replaying an argument that you had with your wife, you know, yesterday. Right. And helplessly. And it’s actually it’s it’s it’s dredging up the emotion that is appropriate to that argument. Right. So now you’re getting angry or regretful or whatever it is. It’s it’s quite crazy. It’s totally normal. I mean, this is the default state of most people most of the time. But given how unhappy the character of our conversation is with ourselves most of the time, given that the stories we’re telling ourselves are less than perfectly inspiring and perfectly ennobling and and, you know, great, you know, opening us to great reservoirs of compassion and wisdom. Right. They’re not doing that. It’s worth looking into this. And it is it does have this dreamlike character of both coming out of nowhere and seizing, completely seizing the reins of attention and identity and taking us elsewhere. And also, we forget it. We it has. That’s part of the totalitarian spirit of rationality, that proclivity. Well, but it is. But a lot of these thoughts aren’t rational. It’s just it’s just you’re just rehearsing your experience. It’s just like you’ll tell yourself the same thing 10 times in a row and never and you won’t be bored on the 10th time. You’ll like if you just imagine what it would be like to externalize your thoughts on a loudspeaker for everyone to listen to, you know, and you were just it was just helplessly, you know, externalized. Every every normal person would sound insane, you know, because because of the the perseveration and the and just the redundancy and the and the strange structure to the discursiveness. I mean, this is this is a. You know, this ever present, it’s so it’s so ever present that it strike. It doesn’t strike people as strange, but to be presuming we have it, we have a dialogue with ourselves as though the eye could talk to the me. And that made any sense at all. It’s like, you know, I’m sitting here and you’re getting set up for this interview. Right. And I’ll think. Oh, I got to get some water. Right. Now, I know if I’m the one to say it and I’m the one who hear it, I know I need water. Who am I telling? Yeah. It’s like it’s like I’m telling someone else, right? Who needs to be informed about this? Well, you’re probably telling the prefrontal cortex and it tells the motor cortex. So, you know, it’s that’s probably the hypothalamus talking to the prefrontal cortex because it doesn’t have direct output over the motor cortex. It’s something like that. Oh, well, I mean, it it. Yeah. It remains to be seen whether any of that is actually functionally necessary. But I think for the most part, it’s not. I mean, for the most part, we we simply talk to it’s almost like we started talking to our parents, you know, once we once we had once my language is incredibly useful, as you know, and it’s it is what defines us as as people in many respects. And once it gets to it’s like once it gets tuned up, it never shuts off. And, you know, we’re talking to it. So, you know, first, we’re pre-linguistic and we’re just drinking in language that’s aimed at us, you know, all the time. Our parents are jabbering to us. We begin to understand what they’re saying, as so much of it is, you know, indexical, they’re pointing to things and we’re naming those things. We’re hearing the the sounds associated with those, the things that are being grasped and handed to us. And and soon we begin to participate in this language game in ways that we’re not conscious of. And once this gets tuned up, we talk to our parents, we jabber to our parents incessantly, and then we jabber to ourselves when they leave the room. And it never stops. Well, you know, Ian McGilchrist and I have talked about this issue and he’s of the opinion. I hope I’m not misrepresenting him. And it’s an idea that I had shared to some degree is that the right hemisphere in many ways, this is in left handed people, at least. And some sense is more regulated by the underlying limbic structures, the motivational structures like an animal is. And and the left hemisphere, to the degree that it’s linguistic, it inhibits those right hemisphere functions tonically. And that’s likely the speech. And what that means implies, perhaps, is that if you can shut that speech off, there’s a different mode of perception that’s characterized by the right hemisphere’s emersionment in these underlying motivational systems that might be part and parcel of that revivification possibility that you’re I think you’re pointing to as something that lies outside the linguistic landscape. And that can be maybe hyper dominant, has become hyper dominant in us because we’re so immersed in language. I mean, from what I can tell, I mean, thus far, the the research on the neuroimaging research on meditation is still in its infancy, despite the fact that there have been hundreds and even thousands of paper papers at this point on meditation. But, you know, silencing the default mode network is certainly part of the the the footprint of of the change here that is relevant. And the default mode network for people, I mean, many people have heard of this by now, but it used to be kind of an esoteric topic. But just a brief review, the default mode network is called the default mode because it was noticed in virtually every neuroimaging experiment ever designed that there was this the system of structures in the midline of the brain that would would increase their their activity in between tasks. So whatever the paradigm was, if you’re giving people a reading task or a sensory task or a memory task or visual discrimination, whatever it is, you’re putting them in the scanner. They have to pay attention to something in those epics between tasks when they were no longer having to pay attention to something that they’re waiting for the next thing to be presented to them. This these set of structures in the midline would increase their activity. And so it was called the default mode. It’s just the kind of the brain’s idling state. But these are also the structures that that seem to have a disproportionate amount of responsibility for self-reference and self-representation. And they get tuned up even further when you give people tasks that require a set a retrospective analysis of the self. You know, if I if I gave you a list of words and I was saying I asked you to decide which of these words apply to you and which of these words don’t apply to you as a person. Right. That’s the kind of task that would increase, you know, above baseline activity in the default mode network. And there are other components to this. You know, you have such questions of identity. I mean, a lot of that is is in whole or in part mediated by the default mode. And this is what becomes noticeably quiescent when you are successfully practicing mindfulness. And it becomes quiescent in in those experiences with psychedelics where this sense of self is is transcended for a time. Now, where linguistic communication often becomes extremely difficult. Yeah, yeah. But people experience. But so what’s interesting here is that that, you know, I think people. I think people. You know, ordinary people who do not take psychedelics and have no interest in meditation do experience. Interruptions in this sense of self a lot that just go unrecognized. And sometimes they go recognized because they’re their so-called peak experiences or flow experiences where, you know, they’ll they’ll even the kinds of experiences you reference, you know, looking up at the Milky Way, you know, the most beautiful encounter with with a starry night you have, you know, in that decade, say you’ve gone to the place where there’s the least light pollution and you’ve got, you know, a cloudless, moonless night. And then you point your gaze skyward and you get the full experience. That’s, you know. There are two experiences people tend to have when they when they have sought out a peak experience like that. If they’re lucky, they really have something like a moment where they’re lifted out of themselves and they they can just have something like this breathtaking encounter with nature. Right. And then all too often that lasts, you know, a second and a half. And then they’re just talking about it and thinking about it and trying to get back to it. But they’re they’re still just jabbering to themselves and to, you know, whoever’s with them, very likely, trying to get a hold of this thing where if you took mushrooms or if you took acid in that circumstance, well, then your linguistic efforts to to get this thing in hand are completely blown over and you have the full, you know, multi hour encounter with the thing itself. Right. And it’s you know, that’s what that’s what’s so amazing about psychedelics is that whoever you are, I mean, let’s leave aside the prospect of having a bad trip, which we know about, which many interesting things can be said. The so-called good trip you can have on mushrooms or LSD is this condition of the data of your senses and you’re in particular in a circumstance like the one you described. Your engagement with the natural world becomes so vivid, so salient that. The boundary between self and world is completely overcome. Right. So you like and the energetics of all of that suddenly becomes very salient. So it’s not just like you’re no longer representing yourself. Also, the consequences, you know, you know, Griffith’s work. And if someone has a mystical experience on psilocybin and their smokers, they stop 75 percent of the time. Yeah. It’s like they live so far out of themselves that even their addictions lift. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That’s quite something. You know, you talk about being possessed by that default network while to be possessed by an addiction like a nicotine addiction is something like that gone wild. Nonetheless, going there apparently has this transformative capacity. You also see the same thing with treatment for alcoholics. You know, I mean, for for years, alcohol researchers have known that the only reliable treatment for alcoholism is spiritual transformation. That’s hard. Empirical researchers have been wrestling with that for a long time. Well, it can give it gives you the sense that, you know, again, I’m not I’m not claiming that the the the beatific vision that one has on LSD or psilocybin is necessarily the the true target state of one’s spiritual life. I mean, it’s you know, in some ways, I think it’s not it’s there’s something misleading about it. But at a minimum, these this this can end to the continuum of positive experience. You know, just just being flooded with bliss and and completely overcome with with an encounter with the present moment and meaning, you know, just the perception of meaning, whether that meaning can be rationally justified in the end, right, because literally you can if you’re in the right state of mind, it doesn’t matter what you’re looking at. It doesn’t have to be the Milky Way. You can just be staring at a, you know, a puddle in the concrete in a parking lot. And all of a sudden, that is the, you know, the answer to the mystery of existence. Right. So in some ways, it’s it’s it’s potentially you. There’s a place to stand where you can pathologize this, you know, this herophany of meaning. But, you know, leaving that aside, leaving that criticism aside, the experience itself proves beyond any possibility of doubt that it’s possible to have an utterly transforming, transformative and totally satisfying encounter with the present moment that isn’t itself dependent on anything happening. It’s a quality of your attention. Now, neurochemically, that’s something obviously has to happen in order to to allow you to pay attention that fully to anything. But there is a way of granting your attention to the present moment so that the sacredness of anything comes fully into view. So, OK, let me I got a couple of questions for you on that. So let’s go back to this starry night idea. So I want to tell you a story. I was talking to my wife today about the fact that I was going to talk to you because she’s been following your meditation course. But at the same time that she’s done, she she she was she had a medical death sentence two years ago. Yeah. Fundamentally. Yeah. OK, so she’s been through a variety of forms of hell and has come out the other side and has changed in consequence of that. And one of the things she started doing as well as doing your meditation course was using the rosary. So I asked her today, she’s also been talking to the Jonathan Pagel, who’s an extraordinarily interesting religious thinker who carves icons. He’s a former French Canadian young guy, very, very deep person in my estimation. In any case, she’s been praying the rosary. And I said, OK, so while you do that and you listen to Sam’s meditations. And so how does that work? And she said, well, I do the rosary first. I said, well, what do you why do you do that? And what do you do and how do you see them related? And she said, well, with the rosary. So she’s she’s concentrating on Mary. And she said Mary’s as a conduit to Christ. And I’ll explain what she meant by that in a sec. But she she it’s a I said she she said, well, first, it’s a practice. OK, so she does it every day. So it’s an embodied practice, right? So she says the words and she moves these beats. And so she’s moving her hands. And there’s it’s divided into five sections. And so when her attention wanders from prayer, it’s brought back because there’s five sections. So you imagine you have this tendency to wander off into the default network. And but by manipulating something with your hands, it ties you to the present moment. Yeah. OK, so it’s a meditative practice that that’s more embodied than just sitting still, say, and she finds that useful. And and while she says the words, well, we’ve talked a lot about what these words mean. And so in reference to the starry night, for example, there’s this series of Renaissance paintings, which are quite magnificent, that show an image of Mary with her with 12 stars around her head and with her foot on a serpent. And that’s that’s an allusion to the Garden of Eden, because well, Eve crushes the serpent beneath her foot. And so and this is relevant to your discussion and our discussion earlier about the deepest of all evils. Right. Because that that’s a concern of yours. It’s been a concern of mine. What’s the darkest possible place? Well, the that snake in those paintings represents that. And that’s why in Christianity, the snake, which is a predator, is associated with Satan, right, as the as what would you say, the emissary of evil or malevolent, something like that. And so because Mary has her head in the stars, she can have her foot on the serpent. And that’s part of that meditation. And while she does that before she listens to your meditation. But that’s where I see the the psychological link, let’s say, because you want to put your psyche in the highest possible place, whatever that is. And we don’t know what it is exactly. But it’s something like what happens when you look up at the night sky. It’s something like that. And if you do that, that means that your foot is simultaneously on that serpent. Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, I don’t have any. First of all, it’s wonderful that she’s using the app and getting some benefit from it. I love that. And there’s no and my and the juxtaposition of doing the rosary with doing, you know, what I’m recommending in the app is not as odd as you might think it is in my in my view. I mean, I have, you know, it’s there’s so much of. There’s so much there’s so much resonance between what I think is true and the kinds of things Jesus said. Right. My own my my issue, my my issue with organized religion, every organized religion is just that clearly what we’re really talking about are deeper universal truths about the nature of of mind. Right. And I mean, you know, whether we do, we’re limited to human minds or just mind itself, consciousness itself. And so there’s no culture, there’s no religion, there’s no provincial cult that has the full story. And what we really what the really the burden on us in in in every present generation, you know, but certainly now in the 21st century, where there are all the barriers to to to. Universalization. All the barriers to getting information and translating from other languages, all of that’s broken down. We have we have access to everyone’s ideas. Right. There have been 100 billion people and a bunch of them have had good ideas. A bunch of them have had bad ideas. And we have access to to thousands of years. Yeah. Human conversation. And my only argument. What those ideas were. My only argument is that we should only care about using the best ideas. And we should and we we no longer have the right to any deep, serious sectarianism. Right now, we can be. That’s not to say that you can’t be especially taken with with Jesus and the tradition that has grown up around him. And, you know, you’re not you’re kind of bored with Socrates. And so you don’t spend as much time with him. That’s all fine. But the problem I’ve had traditionally with organized religion is religion historically is the only corner of culture where people begin saying to themselves and to their children, we’re playing a totally different game over here. This is not just this is not a matter of just ideas and human beings and human conversations and ordinary books. No, no, these books were written by God or inspired by God, you know, and they can’t be edited. And every I think it seems to me that the danger in that I’m not disagreeing with you, but it seems to me the danger in that is that it it actually minimizes the problem of atrocity that’s associated with sectarianism, because and perhaps you know, I’ll agree with you. You can heap as many atrocities as you want on that side of the balance. I will agree with you. Well, OK, so this is what I’m pointing to, though, because we’re having a discussion in some ways about sacred things. And so and then we’re talking about the issue of religion. And so there’s a couple of things I want to say about that. Dostoevsky had it right to some degree in The Grand Inquisitor, because do you remember that story, The Grand Inquisitor? Yeah, I mean, it’s been been many. OK, well, several decades. I actually read the book. But well, the remarkable thing about that story is Christ comes back to Earth. And he does some miracles. And it’s the church himself that puts him in jail. And then the head of the church comes to the jail and says, what the hell are you doing back here? The last thing we need is you. We’ve got everything sorted out. We know what’s going on. It’s like we’re going to put you to death tomorrow. And then Christ kisses him on the lips and The Grand Inquisitor turns white. And then when he leaves The Grand Inquisitor, he leaves the door open. And that was that’s so brilliant. And, you know, Dostoevsky was writing at the same time as Nietzsche and had quite an influence on Nietzsche as it turned out. And but because Dostoevsky was writing fiction, he could go places that Dostoevsky couldn’t go as a philosopher. And one of the things he was trying to point out was that despite the proclivity to totalitarianism, that you can lay at the feet of sectarian religion. The doors left open. And, you know, all of us have to come to terms with the fact that our institutions, religious and otherwise, tend to ossify into these totalitarian structures that are analogous socially, I think, in some ways to the default network that you just described. They’re trying to point to something beyond that. But, you know, they degenerate and ossify. And then but but then we have to go underneath that, too, if we’re going to get our criticisms right, because as terrified as it’s reasonable to be about religious sectarianism and totalitarianism, it’s also necessary to remember that chimpanzees go on raiding parties and and kill the neighboring tribe, so to speak. And they’re not motivated by religious concerns. And so to put that at the feet of religion, even implicitly, I think is I understand why. That’s an impulse, but it doesn’t face the problem deeply enough. And it also obscures a potential solution, I think, because it tends it tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And I know you’re trying to regain the baby. Yeah, no, I’m trying to save the baby. Yeah, yeah. No, I love that baby. Yeah, I mean, for me, the the crucial variables that make religion itself so problematic are one, the religions and this is true of the Abrahamic ones in particular, the religions that are focused on a text that can’t be edited. Now, you religious moderates and religious liberals will disagree with me. And they’ll say that the whole tradition is a matter of, you know, reinterpreting and grappling with the the the contradictions and the and that’s of all a very rich discourse and blah, blah, blah. But the real problem is the books themselves betray their merely human origin on almost every page. You know, there’s just like, you know, it’s true of the plays of Shakespeare. It’s true of the Iliad and the Odyssey. It’s true of of Virgil. It’s true of Dostoevsky and it’s true of the Bible. Right. In all its parts. Right. So there’s just there’s and. You know, if you just imagine how good a book would be, could be if it were truly written or dictated by an omniscient being, I mean, it’s it’s just it’s trivially easy to imagine that it would be so much better than they in fact are. It’s really not that easy to translate the sorts of experiences that you’re pointing to into words. No, no, no, no. I know. I know. No, but but you can you can do it better and worse. Well, but OK. OK. Let’s talk about that for a minute. Better and worse, because that’s really that that. And I want to tie this back to your comments about navigation earlier. So, you know, we do have and this is perhaps an issue of definition. Getting the definition straight again here. We do have the sense that some texts are deeper than others. And I don’t think it’s reasonable to disagree about that. You can read a shallow story. You think, well, you know, that was shallow and you can read a deep story and you think that was deep, but you don’t know exactly what you mean by shallow or deep. So let me let me just add one footnote here, which is somewhat confounding. It goes to what we were just saying about psychedelics. It’s possible for you to be bringing the depth to a text or to a circumstance or to a puddle in the in a parking lot that isn’t necessarily there. Right. So like this is where it gets the postmodern quandary. Yeah. Like, literally, I, you know, you if you’re if you’re going to connect all the dots, you know, you can. This is something I did in the end of faith as a as a parlor trick, just because I wanted to prove this point is that I literally walked into a bookstore and went to the cookbook aisle, the bookstore, and randomly chose a cookbook and opened it, opened it up at random and just just dictated, it just wrote down the recipe and then created a mystical text on the basis of that recipe. And I just I just showed that this recipe, which it was for some Hawaiian cookbook was like wok seared fish and shrimp cakes or something. And I took the ingredients in that recipe and wove a completely confabulatory mystical text out of those ingredients. Now, that that was something I was bringing to the text. There was no author creating that document. That’s clearly a problem. And look, I actually and people can always do that. Right. So that that’s it’s very hard to keep score here and to be and to be rigorous. All we can do is again and again, have this this experience of you say something that that on your own side purports to be meaningful and intends to be meaningful and you’re trying to convey something. And then I and other people seem to grasp what you’re communicating. And we have this intersubjective convergence, which is increasingly satisfying. And yes, so I mean, but I do take your point that Dostoevsky was writing, you know, The Brothers Karamazov is a deeply interesting, meaningful document. And so let’s take that. Let’s take that argument apart. Because you put your finger on the postmodern quandary, right? Because the postmodernists in some sense, the reason that they ran into trouble. With assuming they criticized the notion that there was a canonical interpretation of a text, because there’s so many subjective interpretations of any text. In fact, there’s a near infinite number of potential subjective interpretations of any text, just like there’s almost an infinite number of places you could be looking right now. And so it’s a huge, deep problem. So so and when you say that you can project something onto the text that in some sense isn’t there, that’s also an extremely deep problem. And these problems are deep enough. You know, the fact of multiple interpretations of a single reality is so pervasive that it stopped AI researchers. It’s the thing that stopped AI researchers from being able to build functional robots like it’s a killer problem. Yeah, it’s a frame problem. So that’s the frame problem. OK, so let’s let’s let’s agree that that exists. But we should also agree and partly, I think, by the merits of your own argument, that we do have a reliable, subjective intuition that texts differ in depth. Yeah. And that that means something. So I’m going to propose what it means. And you tell me what you think about this. OK. Sure. So one of the ways that we specify where to look at is by looking at what we deem to be important. And so here’s a way of conceptualizing that. And it sort of maps onto the idea of the fovea extending outward to less high resolution consciousness. So I write a sentence because I want to write a paragraph. I write a paragraph because I want to sequence paragraphs into a book, a chapter. I write chapters to sequence them into a book. I write a book because I want to be a practicing scientist. I want to be a practicing scientist because I’m a good citizen. I want to be a good citizen, hypothetically, because I want to be a good person. You know, and maybe I want to be a good person to avoid the hell that you described. OK, so those are nested value structures. And we see the world through that structure simultaneously. The whole thing is there. And if one part of it collapses, we make reference to the part that contains it. That’s how we don’t crash like a computer. Now that now the navigation that you described, these nested structures, their navigation maps, as far as I can tell. Now, OK, so here’s the depth issue. Some maps have more other maps dependent on them than other maps do. OK, so if I go into your map structure, some of that’s even propositionized and I mess about with the deeper axiomatic propositions upon which many other propositions rest, then that’s going to disturb you fundamentally. And that’s part of that experience of depth. And, you know, look, look, you get much more if you’re married and you love your wife, you’re much more upset if she divorces you than if you have an argument about who should do the dishes. Well, why? Well, because the stability of your marriage is a precondition for all sorts of other ways that you perceive the world. And if that’s violated, well, that’s traumatic. Yeah. So so when we so and the reason I’m trying to get this clear with you is because you think clearly about these things, but also because it allows. To it allows for clarification of language in some sense, so we could say that as you go deeper into that nested structure, what you approach becomes more and more sacred by definition. I’m trying to define it experientially because the. So let’s say you’re transformed at a fundamental level. That means something shifts way down deep. And that’s how you feel it, even in an embodied sense. And and what we’ve defined as as human beings, as religious, as far as I can tell, or as sacred is. Our attempt to define the landscape that is characterized by those deepest structures of maps. Now, what you’re talking about, I think, is outside the map system altogether, in some sense, you know, it’s the container for all of it. Yeah, yeah, it is in some sense, because or it’s orthogonal to it. I mean, it penetrates it at every point, but it’s not reducible to it. And I mean, that’s why it’s so consequential. So, for instance, I think you can. So to taking accepting your your picture of nested maps and depth and all that, I agree with all of that. And maps can be more or less it useful and more or less in register with with the reality they’re purporting to describe, right? So you can have faulty maps. And in science, we really try to get an accurate map. And we have a high resolution map. Yeah. And we have a language game, which is when it’s working, is optimized to, you know, as Richard Feynman famously said, not fooling ourselves. Right. I mean, that’s like the master value of not fooling yourself. Whereas I would argue in in religious discourse, not fooling yourself is not a master value. And in fact, you know, so much of what goes by the name of religious faith. OK, but let me put this on terminology then, because you talk about the sacred. Right. And you accept that. And you also and you also see it as revivifying and and and crucial to the prevention of suffering. But you juxtapose that against religion. And so what what’s the difference as far as you’re concerned between what’s sacred and what’s religious? Yeah. Good question. Well, so. Maybe the best way to get at it is by reference to a principle, which is. I think what I think anything that’s true, right. And this is true scientifically, descriptively, but it’s true spiritually and it’s true with respect to anything we would call sacred. Anything that’s true, anything that’s real is discoverable now. Right. It’s like a little like like if we if we lost everything, if we lost all the books, if we lost all the tools, if we lost everything and we just found ourselves having to reboot, not only civilization, but the human cognition, you know. Everything that is real is discoverable from that starting point, even if you’re even if you’re starting zero again. Now, we would we would talk about it differently. We would have, you know, we would we would have memories of what you know, some of us would have memories of all that we’ve lost, and that would anchor us to certain expectations. But the point is, what is true? What is real? What is what is what is the real opportunity for a direct self-transcending engagement with reality? Right. What is the real opportunity? Let me take it. Let me take exception to that in one manner. I see what you mean. I understand what you mean. I believe. But here’s here’s a potential problem with that. So first, I’m not saying let me just close the door to a possible misunderstanding. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t stand on the shoulders of giants. And I’m not saying tradition is useless. In fact, I would I would probably agree with you that that we should be fairly conservative in how we in how we overthrow our traditions. I mean, so I’m not I’m not arguing that we should just be radical iconoclasts that tears that we should tear everything down to the studs and start again. That’s not that’s not what I’m advocating. Well, what’s the difference? What’s the difference in your vision then between the tradition that you would be conservative about and religion? I’m not trying to corner you. I’m just trying to see how you’re making the distinction conceptually. It comes down to very specific claims that that I think are clearly false and which many of our religions advertise as not only important, but indispensable for their projects. So take Islam as a specific example. Is I mean, Islam, mainstream Islam, not just Al Qaeda style Islam, just any Islam that really is worthy of the name in the year 2021 is founded on the claim that the Koran is the literal word of God. And it is it is not to be seen as what what does literal mean. Yeah. But but in the minds of most Muslims most of the time, it means that these stanzas were dictated to Mohammed in his cave by the archangel Gabriel. And he was he was commanded to recite and he recited them. And what we have here is in truth, the claim, the the the the orthodox claim is is even more stringent than the seemingly analogous, you know, fundamentalist religion, you know, Christian claim about the Bible. It’s not just that the text itself is is verbatim what God said. It’s that the document itself is, in fact, like the every instantiation of the physical document is itself the word of God. It’s like it’s sort of a double layer of sacredness to it. Well, is it cannot be edited? Is the problem that claim or is it the problem that the people who purport to understand it claim to be 100 percent right? No, no. But the problem is, is that given that claim and given the actual contents of the book, which you have is an endless source of divisiveness and conflict, like if you dignify that claim, so, OK, this is the most important series of utterances ever expressed on Earth. This is it. Let’s find out what the creator of the universe wants us to know. What he wants us to know above all else is that one, we should hate and fear and despise and resist and never befriend unbelievers. Right. That’s that’s that message comes through on virtually every page. And a hell has been prepared for these unbelievers, where their skins will be endlessly burned off of them and replenished so that they can be tortured anew. Right. Do you think there’s any relationship between that claim and your observation that failure to take refuge in the sacred as you’ve laid it out dooms you to possession by the default network and puts you into the tension? OK, so it is it is possible to give a very enlightened reading of this text or really any text that that allows you to step out of its divisive and and toxic implications. So I would support that kind of reading. You know, if if if we if we were joined in this conversation by by Muslim scholars who said, no, no, don’t you understand Jordan’s spiritual interpretation of this admonishment is precisely what God intended. He intended it to be to be an engine, not of hate and division and sectarian tribalism. He intended it to be a device that would allow you to recognize the the emotional and cognitive implications of of being caught by dualism, say, right. Like really, you know, et cetera, et cetera. He goes as far as you want in that direction. That’d be great. The problem is the book itself gives no indication that your interpretation is the right one. In fact, it gives every indication that it’s not. And that is heterodox with a sequence of Muslim scholars. Good luck. Well, I wish you good luck there. Well, I I I’m praying for good luck because it’s an it’s a conversation that absolutely needs to be had. Yeah, I would agree. So I would like to keep. Yeah, so I just thought it was a close to finally close this chapter. I would just say that it’s not that what you’re doing with the book isn’t possible. My concern is that these books, these books tend to make that very difficult. And there are other more plausible and easier interpretations that require less hermeneutics, less cognitive bandwidth, less, less principles of charity and less cosmopolitanism. And so therefore, it’s no accident that you wind up with something like the Islamic state if you take the Quran very, very seriously. And that’s that’s what worries me as we as we live in this world where it’s increasingly easy for small numbers of people to screw up the whole project for millions of us. You know, as as technology, you know, leverages the consequence of. Well, that’s why I was focusing on development of the individual, you know, because it is increasingly possible for individuals to do that. So we have to stop doing it. Yes. Yeah, I’m with you there. Look, I would love to keep talking to you. I want to ask you one more. I’m getting tired, and that’s why I know because I’m going to get fuzzy minded. One first, maybe we should do another event. Sure. OK, I will talk to my agents. Second, this idea you had about escaping from the text, let’s say, and returning to existential first principles or phenomenological first principles. The only objection I can see to that is that if you lose, you can’t derive the way of producing a social organization directly from the existential experience. And so that’s a right, because you think, look, partly we’re going to derive our sacred values from this left this strata of experience that you described. But there’s also an element. There’s also the fact that we derive our values from collective agreement. And maybe we feed the collective agreement with the sacred experience. But then if we lose that that collective tradition, it’s very difficult to rebuild that from first principles. Yeah, 100 percent. And I would say just to clear up any confusion on this point, I’m not suggesting that meditation or even the the deepest insights you can have through meditation or psychedelics is sufficient. For everything to forget, for us to get everything we want out of life. Right. It’s like it’s I think it’s proper use is, as you describe, is seeding every other ordinary moment in life with this capacity to refresh the mind and and. And an allowance, revivify the sense of the mind, and an allowance, revivify the stale dogma of men. Just just it is the thing that equips us to actually be loving and unconflicted and relaxed in the present moment, whatever, whatever is going on. But when you ask the question, what should we do to build a viable global civilization? There are so many other modes of of of conversation and knowledge gathering and reliance upon institutions and and tradition. That is necessary. You know, I’m not I’m not imagining some beautiful state of nature where we have lost our all of the structure that we’ve built up over thousands of years and we just we just meditate. Yogis and yeah. And then try to figure out then try to call someone when our, you know, Internet goes down. Right. We there’s a tremendous amount of knowledge that we need to do anything well at this point, you know, as we’ve just witnessed in, you know, getting through. You know, now we’re now into our second year of a global pandemic. Right. I mean, we have a lot to figure out. How do we how do we even make sense with one another in the presence of social media? And how do we respond when when trust in institutions has broken down? There’s a lot to to figure out. And meditation and, you know, psilocybin and any, you know, and and and a a full speed collision with the with the beauty and profundity of the present moment isn’t the answer to many of those questions. It’s just it is. It’s the answer to. Yeah, it’s a wellspring. It’s a wellspring, you know, like existential dread and, you know, et cetera. So, yeah, I mean, that’s anyway. I love talking to you and I’m very happy to see your face. And it’s really good to see you again. And I remember why why we kept talking now. Yeah. And maybe I remember why other people came and listened. And so I would love to do it again. Sure. Sure. Well, because we’re going to we’ll hammer it out, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, good to see you, man. Thanks for agreeing to talk to me again. And good luck with your app and everything that you’re doing. Yeah. And with your orientation towards the highest good, all of that. Yeah. Back at you. Back at you. OK, man. Take care of yourself. Talk soon. OK, I’ll get in touch. I look forward to it.