“On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice. It’s actually very easy to give people good advice. It’s very hard to follow the advice that you know is good…. If someone came to me with my list of problems, I would be able to sort that person out very easily.”
Sam Harris (TW: @SAMHARRISORG, SAMHARRIS.ORG) received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA. He is the author of the best-selling books The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue (with Maajid Nawaz). He also hosts the popular podcast Waking Up with Sam Harris.
Spirit animal: Owl
Sam and I first met in the bathroom at TED in 2010, immediately after I’d accidentally (truthfully) eaten two enormous pot brownies. I was not prepared for the THC or Sam Harris, and especially not mega-THC and Sam Harris.
“What you should have in your mind is a picture of controlled chaos. These are not the smoothly oiled gears of a well-calibrated machine. This is somebody staggering out of his bedroom in search of caffeine, and he may or may not have checked his email before the whistle on the kettle blew. But I do meditate frequently and certainly try to make that every day [for 10 to 30 minutes].”
“Jaan Tallinn, one of the founders of Skype, said that when he talks to people about this issue, he asks only two questions to get an understanding of whether the person he’s talking to is going to be able to grok just how pressing a concern artificial intelligence is. The first is, ‘Are you a programmer?’—the relevance of which is obvious—and the second is, ‘Do you have children?’ He claims to have found that if people don’t have children, their concern about the future isn’t sufficiently well-calibrated so as to get just how terrifying the prospect of building superintelligent machines is in the absence of having figured out the control problem [ensuring the AI converges with our interests, even when a thousand or a billion times smarter]. I think there’s something to that. It’s not limited, of course, to artificial intelligence. It spreads to every topic of concern. To worry about the fate of civilization in the abstract is harder than worrying about what sorts of experiences your children are going to have in the future.”
“Buddha and countless contemplatives through the ages can attest to the experience of, for lack of a better phrase, unconditional love. That has some relationship to what I would call ‘self-transcendence,’ which I think is even more important. So, there’s this phenomenon that’s clearly deeper than any of our provincial ways of talking about it in the context of religion. There’s a deeper truth of human psychology and the nature of consciousness. I think we need to explore it in terms that don’t require that we lie to ourselves or to our children about the nature of reality, and that we don’t indulge this divisive language of picking teams in the contest among religions. [My book Waking Up is] about the phenomenon of self-transcendence and the ways in which people can explore it without believing anything on insufficient evidence. One of the principal ways is through various techniques of meditation, mindfulness being, I think, the most useful one to adopt first. There’s also the use of psychedelic drugs, which is not quite the same as meditation, but it does, if nothing else, reveal that the human nervous system is plastic in a very important way, which means your experience of the world can be radically transformed.”
“‘Mindfulness’ is just that quality of mind which allows you to pay attention to sights and sounds and sensations, and even thoughts themselves, without being lost in thought and without grasping at what is pleasant and pushing what is unpleasant away….
“We’re so deeply conditioned to be lost in thought and to have this conversation with ourselves from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep. It’s just chatter in the mind, and it’s so captivating that we’re not even aware of it. We are essentially in a dream state, and it’s through this veil of thought that we go about our day and perceive our environment. But we are just talking to ourselves nonstop, and until you can break that spell and begin to notice thoughts themselves as objects of consciousness, just arising and passing away, you can’t even pay attention to your breath, or to anything else, with any clarity.”
• What is “vipassana” meditation?
“It’s simply a method of paying exquisitely close and nonjudgmental attention to whatever you’re experiencing anyway.”
TF: Many of the guests in this book listen to Sam’s guided meditations on SoundCloud or his site. Just search “Sam Harris guided meditations.” Per Sam: “People find it very helpful to have somebody’s voice reminding them to not be lost in thought every few seconds.”
“In my case, [meditation] didn’t really become useful, which is to say it really didn’t become true meditation, until I had sat my first one or two intensive retreats. I remember the experience clearly. I’d been very disciplined and had been sitting an hour every day in the morning for a year before I sat my first 10-day retreat. I remember looking back over that year at some point, somewhere around the middle of my first 10-day vipassana retreat, and realizing that I had just been thinking with my legs crossed every hour that I had practiced that year. This is not to say that this will be true of all of you who are practicing meditation without ever having gone on a retreat, but it’s very likely true of many of you…. A silent retreat is a crucible where you can develop enough energy and attention to break through to another level….”
In his fantastic and lengthy essay “Drugs and the Meaning of Life,” Sam wrote:
“If she [my daughter] does not try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in her adult life, I will worry that she may have missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience … a life without drugs is neither foreseeable nor, I think, desirable.”
I asked him about these lines in our conversation, and he added:
“The caveat is that I have an increasingly healthy respect for what can go wrong on psychedelics, and wrong in a way that I think has lasting consequences…. I think they’re still indispensable for a lot of people. They certainly seem to have been indispensable for me. I don’t think I ever would have discovered meditation without having taken, in particular, MDMA, but mushrooms and LSD also played a role for me in unveiling an inner landscape that was worth exploring….
“The sense of being a self riding around in your head—this feeling that everyone calls ‘I’—is an illusion that can be disconfirmed in a variety of ways…. It’s vulnerable to inquiry, and that inquiry can take many forms. The unique power and liability [of psychedelics] is that they are guaranteed to work in some way….
“[Ethnobotanist Terence McKenna’s] point was, well, if you teach someone to meditate or to do yoga, there’s no guarantee whatsoever that something is going to happen. They could spend a week doing it. They could spend a year doing it. Who knows what’s going to happen? They may just get bored and wander away, not knowing that there was a there there. If I give you 5 grams of mushrooms or 300 micrograms of LSD and tell you to sit on that couch for an hour, you are guaranteed to have a radical transformation of your experience. It doesn’t matter who you are. A freight train of significance is going to come bearing down on you, and we just have to watch the clock, to know when it’s going to happen….
“If you have a good experience, you’re going to realize that human life can be unutterably sublime—that it’s possible to feel at home in the universe in a way that you couldn’t have previously imagined. But if you have a bad experience—and the bad experiences are every bit as bad as the good experiences are good—you will have this harrowing encounter with madness. It’s as pathological as it is in any lunatic who’s wandering the streets, raving to himself and completely cut off from others. You can have that experience, and hopefully it goes away, and in virtually every case, it does go away. But it’s still rough, and it still has consequences. Some of those consequences are good. I happen to think that it gives you a basis for compassion, in particular for people who are suffering mental illness, that you couldn’t otherwise have.”
Look at the sky while meditating. “Often my meditation is in the afternoon. I often try to do it outside. If you know anything about Dzogchen, you know that Dzogchen yogis often use the sky as kind of a support for practice. You meditate with your eyes open looking at a clear sky or any place where you can see the horizon. I like to practice that way. I don’t always get a chance to do it, but I find that it clears the head in a very useful way.”
Listen to episode #87 of The Tim Ferriss Show (fourhourworkweek.com/87) for Sam’s thoughts on the following: